[H-CG27] Nuclear Power and Geoscience in Japan: 10 years after the 3.11 complex disaster

[HCG27-P04] A personal summary of JPGU sessions about earth science and nuclear power plants in Japan

*Satoshi Kaneshima¹ (1.Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Kyushu University)

Keywords:nuclear power plants, earth scientific khowledge, uncertainty

In this poster I discuss about the issues regarding the uncertainty of the scientific knowledge that earth scientists can provide for our society in order to help mitigate hazards associated with nuclear power plants. Through the series of our JPGU sessions held since 2013 about the relation between nuclear power plants and earth science, a consensus seems to have been reached among the participants. It is the recognition of substantial uncertainty inherent in the forecasts and/or evaluations on important issues such as the maximum size of earthquake at the trenches, the maximum ground motions anticipated at specific nuclear sites, and the long term safety of the nuclear waste deposition sites. Although this recognition seemingly is also shared by our society to some extent since the 2011 great Tohoku earthquake, the earth science community has to relentlessly keep announcing serious difficulties that any attempts to give reliable assessment must face. As long as the earth science issues mentioned above are concerned, the earth science community present day should not recommend a specific scientific model or evaluation for the society or policymakers to take, but rather should provide with the range of uncertainty in the models as clearly as possible. The community now needs to specifically develop an efficient system that can objectively and reasonably define the uncertainty ranges about those issues.