ENGINEERING & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: PROTECTIONS, HAZARDS, AND TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS

Citizens have become increasingly concerned about sharing risks and resources in a fair and equitable way - awareness is increasing that Environmental Justice (EJ) should play a greater role. Evaluating fairness in the design of different schemes involving exposure to harms is the domain of philosophy, psychology, and politics, well outside the domain of engineering practice - a discipline central in evaluation of potential for harms and cost of protections as dictated by requirements citizens place on deployed hazardous technological systems in laws. Still, engineers are often asked to support schemes with quantitative risk estimates for harms, such as in Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA). Within the narrow domain of deployed hazardous technological systems, engineers can provide limited support for EJ schemes when they ask for de minimis harm and thereby remove the need to make judgements on fairness (for harms).(1) Empirical evidence with decades of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulation of risk management in the United States commercial nuclear power industry shows engineering practice can produce designs with effectively no risk for harm. The same experience indicates investors may be unwilling to fund such designs based on their expected return in competitive markets.