Mitigating risk or creating new ones? The role of technology, environment and institutions in framing risk in India's nuclear power sector

In spite of the Fukushima nuclear accident, nuclear power has grown as a strategic policy goal for India. As an emerging economy, India has to balance rapidly growing energy demand from a booming population with key vulnerabilities to climate change. The dual imperatives of environmental and economic needs have led to the recasting of nuclear power as a beneficial, green technology to meet base load electricity demand while mitigating the risk of climate change. However, nuclear power also produces toxic waste and thermal pollution that has huge impacts on eco-systems, which will eventually feedback to social and technological systems. These contradictions raise new questions about what risks are involved; what risks are being mitigated at the expense of exposure to other risks; and how they influence the way technological systems are designed to ensure safety. While much of the current literature on risk and nuclear power focuses on expert-vs-lay risk perceptions and the cultural construction of risk in developed countries, less has been done on the influence of non-human actants, particularly in key institutions in a developing country like India, which faces different forms and magnitudes of environmental and technological challenges. Using a combination of Ortwin Renn’s Social Arena Theory and Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper will attempt to address 1) the processes of interaction between technological, environmental and social actants, 2) their influence on the construction of risk in key institutions, and 3) the implications for operational safety best practices in the industry. Renn’s Social Arena metaphor provides a good framework for analysing non-linear interactions between agents and structure – i.e. arena rules – within institutions. His theory however, does not include non-human actors, which is where Latour’s ANT can provide new insights by examining human-non-human networks of relations in the simultaneous production and construction of risk.