Exploring reactor safety
7 - 22 September 2023
Biography
Professor Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and the director of the Masters of Public Policy and Global Affairs program at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. Between 2017 and 2022, he served as the Director of UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues. During the 2020-21 academic year, he was a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a member of a number of professional bodies that deal with nuclear energy and weapons, including the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the Canadian Pugwash Group, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
Professor Ramana has been engaged in research about nuclear energy for over two decades, informing scholarship and public discussions on nuclear energy policy in various countries. He is the co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream, which dealt with the acquisition of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan, and author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed academic papers, and over 200 newspaper, magazine, and online articles, including in Harper’s, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, Japan Times, Toronto Star, Hindustan Times, Dawn, Jordan Times and Jakarta Post. He has also co-authored the script for an animated film on Ted-Ed.
He has been regularly invited by government bodies at different levels to present his research. Examples include the Standing Committee on Science and Research, House of Commons, Ottawa, the Oregon House Committee on Energy & Environment, Salem, and the Standing Committee on Environment and Planning, Parliament of Victoria, Australia. Ramana’s contributions have been recognized through the American Physical Society’s 2014 Leo Szilard Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Research Summary
The purpose of the visit is to consolidate work on a collaborative monograph that advances a range of new perspectives on the safety of atomic energy. Ramana and Downer have earlier examined safety assessments of nuclear reactors, and the nature of knowledge-claims about the likelihood of severe accidents. (This was based on a case study of the processes through which the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed the “AP1000 reactor” design, while grappling with concerns about the structural integrity of the outer shield building and the vulnerability of its containment to corrosion.) The monograph will bring together the researchers’ separate disciplinary backgrounds — Physics/Public Policy and Sociology/STS — to address a range of questions pertaining to US/UK reactor safety.
The project is important and timely for a number of reasons. It is important academically because it brings together Downer’s work on technological risk governance and the nature of technological failure, with Ramana’s extensive, globally-recognized depth and breadth of technical knowledge on reactor safety, and the political economy of nuclear energy. It is timely, politically, because it comes at a moment when atomic energy is seeing a ‘renaissance’ in the UK and abroad — driven, in part, by new reactor designs and a need to cut carbon emissions — which is reopening public discourse around the technology itself.
Professor Ramana is hosted by Dr John Downer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS).
Planned activities include:
