Esselborn, Zachmann 2020 Safety by Numbers

History and Technology
An International Journal
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghat20
Nuclear safety by numbers. Probabilistic risk

analysis as an evidence practice for technical
safety in the German debate on nuclear energy
Stefan Esselborn & Karin Zachmann
To cite this article: Stefan Esselborn & Karin Zachmann (2020) Nuclear safety by numbers.
Probabilistic risk analysis as an evidence practice for technical safety in the German debate on
nuclear energy, History and Technology, 36:1, 129-164, DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1766916
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1766916
Published online: 08 Jun 2020.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 76
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ghat20
HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY
2020, VOL. 36, NO. 1, 129–164
https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1766916
Nuclear safety by numbers. Probabilistic risk analysis as an

evidence practice for technical safety in the German debate
on nuclear energy
Stefan Esselborn and Karin Zachmann
Subject Area History of Technology, Technische Universität München (TUM), Munich, Germany
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The article explores the introduction of Probabilistic Risk Assessment Nuclear energy; probabilistic
(PRA) for nuclear energy in the two German states, the FRG and the risk analysis; technical safety;
GDR since the late 1960s. We argue that PRA - which promised to risk; evidence practices
make potential dangers associated with the new technology calcul-
able, comparable and seemingly controllable by reducing them to
numerical terms - is best understood as an evidence practice, aiming
to (re-)establish intersubjective agreement on nuclear safety through
quantification. As such, the introduction of PRA was from the begin-
ning also a political question, tied to the destabilization of alternative
evidence practices. While in both the FRG and the GDR, the relativiza-
tion of the promise of absolute safety inherent in the new method
proved problematic, this was an even bigger obstacle in the socialist
East. Although PRA ultimately failed to (re-)establish a societal con-
sensus on nuclear energy in Germany, its institutionalization shaped
the societal discourse on dangerous technologies.
Introduction
The controversy around nuclear power, which reached its greatest intensity in Germany
in the 1970s and 1980s, has often been ascribed a ‘paradigmatic role’ in the changing
relationship of (post-) modern society toward technology and technological risks.1 The
embittered societal and political conflicts surrounding atomic energy generation not only
coincided with, but greatly contributed to a widespread loss of trust in governments,
scientific experts, and the optimistic promise of technological progress more generally.2
In the new ‘risk society’ arising in the shadow of heated arguments over permissible
doses, residual risks and the environmental consequences of industrial mass production,
the sociologist Ulrich Beck claimed in his widely read societal diagnosis published in
1986, science and technology were losing their ‘monopoly on rationality’. Private citizens,
often dismissed as ill-informed or even ‘irrational’ by technical and scientific experts,
were increasingly asserting their right to their own, common-sense-based judgement in
questions potentially impacting their health and safety.3 Simultaneously, however, Beck
noticed a second, seemingly contradictory dynamic: The increasing ‘scientification’ and
specialization of knowledge about potential dangers, risks and side effects, bringing about
CONTACT Stefan Esselborn Stefan.Esselborn@tum.de

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
130 S. THE ESSELBORN AND K. ZACHMANN
the establishment of a sprawling scientific infrastructure and a flourishing technical

industry dedicated to their detection, definition and mitigation.4 One major contributing
factor to this development was the spread of a new, supposedly more objective and
scientific method for measuring and assessing technical safety: Probabilistic Risk
Analysis (PRA), also known as Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA).5 Nuclear energy
played a key role in this second development as well. Although the new approach drew on
a number of known methods and practices from different technical and scientific
disciplines (such as mathematical stochastics, actuary statistics, medical epidemiology,
systems analysis, and electrical and aeronautical reliability engineering), its breakthrough
as a new scientific field is generally credited to the work done in the context of nuclear
safety in the 1970s.6 At least in its initial, most ambitious forms, PRA promised the
possibility of making the potential dangers posed by nuclear installations calculable,
comparable and seemingly controllable by reducing them to quantitative terms – ideally
even to one single number.
The synchronism of these two developments is of course no coincidence. The history of
PRA cannot be separated from its political and societal context, namely the escalating
societal and political controversy on nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s, and the efforts
of constructors, operators and regulators of nuclear reactors to counter increasing criticism
that they exposed the public to unjustifiable dangers. In this article, we will therefore look at
the history of the quantification of nuclear risk as what we would like to call an evidence
practice, i.e. a specific set of methods, concepts and criteria designed and applied to prove
the validity of certain claims or assertions. While the concept builds on the longstanding
and extensive discussion on evidence in philosophy and theory of science, we understand it
to include more than ‘just’ scientific methods of proof.7 Evidence practices, as we define
them, also fulfill an important role in the transition of knowledge from the realm of science
to its application in society: As seemingly neutral arbitrators, they facilitate intersubjective
agreement on what counts as legitimate knowledge on a certain subject.8 Methods and
practices of evidence production are never independent of the presentation, contextualiza-
tion and use of evidence. For this reason, evidence practices are not fixed in one particular
form, but constantly enacted and re-enacted in socio-epistemic negotiation processes.9
Arising at the interstices between science and society, they are co-produced by diverse
groups of actors – including, in the case of nuclear power, scientists and engineers,
regulators and judges, reactor builders, utility companies and insurances, as well as con-
cerned citizens and anti-nuclear activists.
Quantification, the recourse to the supposedly universal language of numbers, has
historically been one of the most widespread and successful evidence practices. This can
partly be attributed to what the sociologist Bettina Heintz has termed the ‘numerical
difference’, i.e. the specific suitability of numbers as a medium for intersubjective commu-
nication and consensus-building due to their relatively high degree of abstraction, self-
referentiality and context-independence.10 At the same time, the ever-increasing ‘avalanche
of printed numbers’ – as Ian Hacking memorably described it – hitting (Western) societies
in the modern era was also the result of political and historical developments.11 As
Theodore Porter and other historians of quantification and statistics have pointed out,
the remarkable rise of these approaches since the nineteenth century was due not only to
their merits as a scientific method, but also to their usefulness as a strategy of social and
political communication.12 Used as a ‘technology of distance’, quantification allowed
HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 131
bureaucrats and experts to present their (subjective) decisions as inescapable corollaries of

strictly ‘objective’ numbers, shoring up their personal authority with an impersonal ‘trust in
numbers’ – and thus insulating them from public discontent and possible repercussions.13
As this article will show, this dynamic is in ample evidence in the history of nuclear PRA.
However, we find that our material also supports the slightly different conclusion of
a number of recent works in the history of quantification, which have shown that the
link between numbers and state power is perhaps not as self-evident as previously assumed.
They stress the idea that, while quantification did indeed often serve as a tool of power, its
authority as an evidence practice could also be harnessed for the contestation and desta-
bilization of ‘official’ narratives put forth by the state and other interested parties.14
Historical research on the origins and development of PRA in the nuclear field has so
far focused almost exclusively on the United States, particularly on the Reactor Safety
Study (RSS) – also known as the Rasmussen study or WASH-1400 – published in 1975.
This is perhaps understandable, given the pioneering nature of the RSS and its status as
a landmark in the history of the field.15 On the side of technical experts as well as the side
of the anti-nuclear movement, the issue of nuclear safety was an intensely transnational
one, and the global influence of the United States as a trendsetter was substantial in both
communities.16 However, the flow of knowledge was not unidirectional, and a number of
researchers and institutions working in different national and international contexts have
made important contributions to the field.17 Moreover, in spite of an increasing globa-
lization of standards, attitudes towards nuclear risk and risk quantification varied greatly
according to specific national (and sometimes local) contexts. Since early modern times,
guaranteeing safety and security has been a crucial prerogative as well as a central
legitimation of the national state – all the more in a high-profile field like nuclear energy,
which was heavily infused with projections of national prestige and identity.18 Even
though international cooperation did occur on the level of research and development, the
national authorities ultimately had the final say, as they set the regulatory and legal
framework, as well as to some extent the political terms of the debate.
For two reasons, the German example makes for a particular interesting case study in
this context. Firstly, the Western part of the country hosted one of the most extensive risk
quantification programs in the world throughout the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in
the second full-scale risk assessment of a nuclear power plant ever conducted, the
Deutsche Risikostudie Kernkraftwerke (DRS).19 Secondly, while sharing a common (or
at least an ‘asymmetrically entangled’20) engineering culture and expert discourse,
Germany was at the same time divided into two states with very different economic
and political systems. Whereas the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) will constitute
the primary focus of this article, the view across the Wall into the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) will provide an interesting comparative foil that will help to clarify the
importance of political and social factors in the development of risk analysis and
assessment as an evidence practice of nuclear plant safety. Confirming Porter’s instruc-
tive thoughts on the special affinity between democratic forms of government and
quantification as a practice of evidence (or as Porter would call it: a technology of
trust), we find that probabilistic risk assessment as a method of calculating uncertainties
with numbers encountered an unequal reception in both German states.21 Whereas
a recourse to numbers promised an argumentative advantage in the highly controversial
public negotiation process on evidence of nuclear safety in the Federal German Republic,
the same numbers were less helpful within the political system of the GDR. Here, not
only the material premises for the production of quantitative risk numbers proved
inadequate in the end, but also the meaning of the numbers was counterproductive to
the political system. Risk quantification for the sake of comparing different fields of risk
relativized statements on safety and thus endangered a basic promise and pillar of
legitimization of the GDR as a socialist ‘welfare dictatorship’.22 This had consequences
not only for technical practices in nuclear engineering, but also for societal risk percep-
tion and the understanding of risk itself.23
In our attempt to trace the introduction and rise of probabilistic and quantitative
approaches to risk as an evidence practice for reactor safety in Germany, as well as the
obstacles, opposition and limits to this rise, we will proceed in four steps. First, we sketch
the problem of evidence in the context of nuclear safety, the solutions proposed in the
international expert discourse up to the mid-1960s and their resonance in the two
German states. Secondly, we follow the discussion on probabilistic methods in the
German expert community from the mid-1960s onwards, outlining the origins and
contours of the extremely ambitious West German program of risk research in the mid-
to-late-1970s. Thirdly, we discuss for the limits of risk quantification in the West German
public discourse and the reasons for the disillusionment with PRA as an evidence
practice, which started in the late 1970s and became prevalent in the early 1980s.
Fourthly and lastly, we look at changing attitudes to risk analysis in the nuclear sector
in East Germany. Although some awareness of probabilistic approaches can be found
among technical experts in the GDR since the 1970s, more serious attempts to quantify
nuclear risk only began to take form in the wake of the accident at Chernobyl, which
radically destabilized previous practices of evidence.
Besides the extensive literature on the history of nuclear energy generation in both
German states,24 the article draws on original research using published and unpublished
sources. In addition to the analysis of contemporary professional journals and publica-
tions, we have conducted multi-archival research in the records of the Bundesarchiv
(BArch) in Berlin and Koblenz, the Archive of the University of Stuttgart (UASt), the
Archives of the Deutsches Museum, Munich (DMA), as well as the Berlin-
Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBA).
How safe is safe (enough)? Evidence for nuclear safety in the late 1950s and
early 1960s
When it came to nuclear safety and the question of how to prove it, scientists and
engineers in the FRG and the GDR started from a remarkably similar position. Both were
relative latecomers to an international expert discourse, to which they initially had little
to contribute. Although some of the celebrated pioneers of atomic physics from the
interwar period, like Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn, occupied important positions in
the atomic programs of the immediate postwar era, German experts had only very
limited practical experience with actual reactors.25 After the wartime experiments
under the Nazi regime had failed to produce a working reactor, the Allies had banned
any further research in the field in 1946.26 This prohibition was only lifted in 1955, when
both German states gained their sovereignty. In the wake of the international nuclear
euphoria marked by the Geneva conference on the ‘Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy’ that
same year, both states rushed to make up the perceived delay in what they thought to be
the key technology for a better, more prosperous future. The race for the first sustained
chain reaction on German soil resulted in a photo finish, as the research reactors in
Garching (FRG) and Rossendorf (GDR) – imported from the United States and the
Soviet Union respectively – became critical within weeks of each other on 31 October and
14 December 1957. The first power reactors, Kahl in the West and Rheinsberg in the East,
started delivering electrical energy in 1962 and 1966.27
The actual construction and operation of nuclear facilities forced German experts on
both sides of the Iron Curtain to confront an issue that their colleagues in the USA, the
USSR, Great Britain and Canada had already been grappling with for several years. That
the use of atomic energy would pose a number of unprecedented safety challenges had
become evident very early on in the development of the new technology. Mainly due to
their large inventory of dangerous fission products, in combination with their instability
and potentially enormous energy output, nuclear reactors were clearly exceedingly
dangerous machines that could potentially kill very large numbers of people and con-
taminate vast areas of land. The first and simplest precaution consisted in building
reactors far away from populated areas, surrounded by an exclusion zone adjusted to
the potential danger posed by the installation.28 With the rapidly increasing number and
size of (planned) reactors, however, this solution had obvious limits – even for countries
as large as the USA or the USSR, not to mention densely populated Europe. To be able to
develop and use nuclear energy, it would be necessary to make reactors ‘safe’ enough to
build them reasonably close to population centers.
However, this posed not only substantial practical difficulties, but also created an
epistemological problem. In spite of increasingly sophisticated modelling and carefully
designed tests, the production and verification of technical knowledge had always relied
to a certain degree on the time-tested method of trial and error: engineers learned from
experience, including mistakes and accidents.29 Such an approach was no longer con-
sidered acceptable in the nuclear field due to its enormous destructive potential. In order
to make sure that nuclear power plants would work safely, engineers and regulators
therefore had to resort to theoretical logic and abstract calculations. When one accident
‘could endanger the population of an entire city’, Edward Teller, head of the United States
Atomic Energy Agency’s (USAEC) Reactor Safeguards Committee from 1947 to 1953,
explained, ‘the trials had to be on paper because actual errors could be catastrophic’.30
But on what basis was it possible to make any definitive claims about something that was
hopefully never to occur in the future? What criteria could be used to judge them? As the
American professional journal Nucleonics asked with some confusion in 1953: ‘How safe
is safe?’31
In the context of the centralized and authoritarian political system of the GDR, where
all relevant entities were state-controlled, this question remained internal to the state
bureaucracy and almost completely inaccessible to ordinary citizens.32 Although an
official licensing procedure, including the composition of official safety reports, was
legally required for all nuclear installations from 1962, at least initially, this does not
seem to have been taken overly seriously.33 With the exception of radiation protection,
where a centralized body with relatively far-reaching authority was set up with the
Staatliche Zentrale für Strahlenschutz (SZS) in 1964, nuclear safety was largely seen as
the concern of the Soviet Union, which designed and delivered the technology.34 Given
the degree of technological as well as political dependence, GDR officials had little choice
but to trust the Soviet assertions that accidents would not occur because of the safe
design, the high quality of materials and the high manufacturing standards of their
reactors.35 Doubting these claims too openly was considered as an affront to the ally
and hence politically ‘taboo’, even among nuclear experts.36 Along with the superior
discipline, qualification and sense of responsibility of the East German operating crews,
the reputation of Soviet engineers had to be proof enough for safety.37
In spite of superior resources and a much greater degree of independence, West
Germany initially did not show much interest in nuclear safety either. Until the late
1960s, an independent research program in this field was practically non-existent in the
FRG, as studying the results of work undertaken elsewhere was considered sufficient.38
However, the problem of evidence for safety proved somewhat harder to escape than in
the GDR, due to the greater number and diversity of actors involved. The first, if still
rather limited, public discussions had already arisen in the context of the siting of the first
nuclear research center near the city of Karlsruhe. In 1956, local residents and commu-
nities started protesting against the dangers posed by the proposed reactor, which they
tried to prove by referring to the international expert discourse, and even took the
regional government to court over the legality of the construction license in 1957.39
The resistance ceased only after legal protections were put in place. The federal
Atomgesetz (atomic law), which was finally adopted after much back and forth in 1959,
specified that a permit for nuclear installations could be issued only if it could be proven
that ‘all necessary precautions required by the state of the art in science and technology’
had been taken against potential damages caused by the construction and operation of
the facility.40 Following the example of the USAEC, prospective operators had to submit
a Sicherheitsbericht (safety report) to the responsible expert panel, the
Reaktorsicherheitskommission (RSK) set up in 1958.41 Because its capacities were limited,
the RSK in turn passed on most of the more technical parts of the review process to the
traditional German industrial self-administration safety watchdogs, the Technische
Überwachungsvereine (TÜV).42
To translate the general instructions of the Atomgesetz into specific, testable criteria,
the RSK turned again to the United States for inspiration – a logical choice, given that
early West German power reactors were almost direct US imports.43 In the early 1960s,
the concept of the ‘maximum credible accident’ (MCA) started to appear in West
German licensing procedures, translated to German as ‘größter anzunehmender Unfall’
(or GAU for short).44 To obtain a license, prospective operators in the USA had to
submit a hazard summary report for ‘paper testing’ to the AEC, which included not
only details on safety features preventing accidents, but also on the consequences of
possible accidents. However, since positing the worst imaginable accidents would have
made siting practically impossible, only those deemed ‘credible’ to occur had to be
taken into account.45 If the projected reactor was able to withstand the most severe of
those, the ‘maximum credible accident’, without releasing more than a certain thresh-
old value of radiation into the environment it was considered licensable. The exact
nature of this accident could theoretically vary for each individual reactor.46 For
practical licensing purposes, however, the MCA soon took on a relatively stable
definition as the complete rupture of the primary coolant circuit for light water
reactors, in some cases in combination with additional assumptions such as the failure
of the emergency cooling system.47 To keep the consequences of this particular

accident minimal, reactor designers in the US added a variety of technical counter-
measures, most importantly an airtight containment shell enclosing the complete
reactor system to hold back fission products.48
The MCA had the advantage of no longer completely ignoring the possibility of
accidents, while at the same time offering – as one German expert put it – a ‘pleasantly
simple mental model’, suitable for licensing purposes.49 It followed traditional, determi-
nistic engineering approaches, built on clearly attributable causalities and clear yes-or-no
answers to specific questions, leading to a seemingly unambiguous decision on whether
the installation in question was safe or not. However, this came at the cost of a very
narrow focus on one specific accident type and a number of logical inconsistencies. While
the MCA was quickly adapted for regulation practice in a number of countries, it was also
highly contentious from the very beginning. At international expert meetings in the early
1960s, British and Canadian experts in particular were quick to criticize the concept.50 In
their view, the MCA concentrated regulatory attention unduly on very severe accidents,
resulting in inordinately high demands on safety technology and creating additional
expenses, without actually proving the safety of reactors. Its particular accident sequence
was largely an arbitrary construct, based on completely subjective decisions like the
distinction made between ‘credible’ and ‘incredible’ events. A number of accidents
could easily be imagined which did not seem much more unlikely, but would arguably
have much more severe consequences – such as the rupture of the reactor pressure vessel.
Instead of wasting money trying to bring one specific type of accident under control,
critics like Frank Farmer, the head of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
(UKAEA) safety division, suggested to approach the problem more systematically. He
started with the admission that absolute safety was unattainable and that ‘[t]he building
of a reactor implies the acceptance of some finite degree of risk’.51 This risk could be
calculated as the product of the expected frequency (i.e. probability) of different kinds of
accident sequences, and their expected consequences.52 By comparing these numbers
with each other, but also with figures for other energy sources like coal, or even general
life risks like driving, it would be possible to determine an acceptable level of risk. This
could then be used to ascertain ‘objectively’ which safety measures were necessary, and
which were not worth the expense. Instead of ‘How safe is safe?’, the central question –
famously formulated by the American nuclear engineer Chauncey Starr in 1969 – now
became: ‘How safe is safe enough?’53 Taken to its logical conclusion, this probabilistic
approach offered a radically different solution to the problem of evidence for nuclear
safety: instead of proving that reactors were safe, one would prove that all alternatives to
nuclear power were at least as risky. This ultimately implied a completely new, more
‘rational’ (respectively: technocratic) perspective on risk in society – and maybe even
a different form of society altogether, as one observer already remarked in 1959.54
Projekt Risikostrategie: The (West) German path to probabilistic risk

analysis
In West Germany, these discussions were followed closely and with considerable interest.55
An ‘expert discussion’ on safety criteria held in Jülich in 1966 registered a ‘general dis-
content’ with the MCA-concept and reflected at length about its numerous shortcomings.56
At the same time, however, many of the country’s leading nuclear experts showed a notable
discomfort with the probabilistic alternative. They referred not only to the substantial
practical difficulties in obtaining reliable data on the failure probabilities of systems and
components, but also to a number of general objections. Josef Wengler, the longtime head
of the RSK, argued ‘strongly’ that ‘statistics only allow[ed] meaningful statements about the
totality of a large number of identical elements’. Such calculations might therefore be useful
for actuary purposes, but would be ‘inadmissible’ as evidence for safety in particular cases.57
Several other participants shared his ‘fundamental reservations against the use of the term
of probability in connection with the licensing of reactors and declined to tolerate solely
a low probability as the only safeguard against severe failures’.58 Not unreasonably,
proponents of the probabilistic approach replied that exactly the same thing was done by
the notion of ‘incredible’ accidents in the framework of the MCA concept. However, even
they had to admit that there was simply not enough data for ‘absolute’ probabilities yet.
Instead, they proposed to start with a ‘mixed’ system that compared relative probabilities of
different failure types to a posited ‘basic accident’, which bore strong resemblance to the
MCA.59
The first attempts to obtain such data were already underway at this point. In 1963, the
first German research institution dedicated specifically to nuclear safety, the
Laboratorium für Reaktorregelung und Anlagensicherheit (LRA) in Munich, became
operational– somewhat belatedly, considering that the first large commercial reactor at
Gundremmingen had already been under construction for a year at this point.60 Under
its first director, the electrical engineer Ludwig Merz, the LRA started out calculating
simulations and developing computer code. Around 1965/66, it added reliability analyses
to its brief.61 This method, originally developed for the electrical and aeronautical
industry in the interwar years, did not look deterministically for reasons of system
malfunction, but approached them probabilistically as the result of random failure of
component parts. Once the probability of these failures was known, it became possible to
calculate the reliability of the entire system.62 True to the history of the method as well as
their own institution, the LRA’s employees began with electric circuits and electronic
component parts, the field to which the existing techniques were best suited, slowly
working their way towards more complex arrangements, like the reactor instrumentation
or the emergency cooling system.63
The push towards probabilities gained traction in the FRG towards the end of the
decade, when the reactor safety discussion in the FRG in general found a new sense of
urgency. As projects for commercial reactors grew in size and in ambition, the RSK came
under pressure to abandon its hitherto largely reactive stance and develop its own ‘safety
philosophy’ (as it now started to be called), one regulatory decision at a time.64 An
important stepping stone in this process was the reactor project pursued by the chemical
company BASF, which in 1967 publicized a plan to build a reactor to produce process
heat on the premises of their main works near Ludwigshafen. Since the selected site was
internationally without precedent in its proximity to potentially dangerous chemical
processing facilities as well as major population centers, its authorization required
a clear break with US licensing criteria, which had so far served as the guiding light of
the RSK.65 For more than half a decade, the RSK and its subsidiaries deliberated whether
the evidence for safety brought by the constructor Siemens was convincing enough to
commit to such a risky endeavor, and whether such a dangerous site should lead to
additional safety demands.66
Against this backdrop, constructors and operators started to push for the probabilistic
option, hoping for an opportunity to ease what they perceived as an ever-increasing burden
of safety measures. At a public panel discussion on siting and safety in late 1968, the
representatives of the biggest West German reactor construction companies agreed that it
was high time to make the switch from what they called the ‘emotional’ and subjective
approach inherent in the MCA-concept to probabilities to a ‘clean mathematical treatment’
based on numbers.67 Almost exactly one year later, Karl-Heinz Lindackers of TÜV
Rheinland presented the first systematic attempt in this direction to a small circle of experts
at the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBW).68 In his view, deterministic
measures for accident prevention should be demanded independently of accident frequen-
cies, as long as their cost was proportional to their benefit. After this point, one entered the
domain of ‘residual risk’, which could only be treated by probabilistic means. For this
purpose, Lindackers adopted the limit curve suggested by Farmer two years earlier,
correlating accident probabilities – which he estimated in the absence on reliable data,
based on rudimentary ‘fault trees’ and experiences with non-nuclear power plants – with
the expected release of Iodine-131, then considered the most dangerous fission product in
German reactors. He proposed that the risk of the operation of a nuclear reactor should be
deemed acceptable, if it increased the likelihood of a randomly selected German citizen to
die – either in the accident itself, or by one of the three most common radiation-related
illnesses – by no more than a certain value, for instance one percent. This quantitative risk
threshold appeared graphically as a simple curve. Placing possible accidents for specific
reactor types within this curve made it possible to visualize immediately not only whether
the risk they posed was acceptable, but also how this would be affected by technical
improvements. Thus, it would be possible to have an ‘objective discussion on safety’ and
‘demonstrate to the population in a quantitative manner that the construction of nuclear
power plants does not mean an increased risk’.69
Lindackers’ suggestions caused a considerable amount of controversy among his
colleagues. Adolf Birkhofer of the LRA, at this point something like the rising star in
West German reactor safety circles, categorically declared in response to Lindackers’
presentation that ‘the probability of reactor accidents cannot be ascertained at the
moment’, and even doubted whether it could be treated by probabilistic means at all.70
Even if it could, he did not think that this would constitute a satisfactory model for
accidents with extremely high numbers of victims. It would make ‘a great difference’, he
argued, ‘whether lethal doses for 10 or 100,000 people could occur after a major
accident’.71 Furthermore, as Otto Groos, the longtime head of reactor safety at the
Ministry, pointed out, any admission that nuclear power raised the general death risk
of the population would lead to ‘long discussions with politicians and doctors’.72 These
doubts were echoed by a substantial part of the West German nuclear safety establish-
ment, especially among its more senior representatives. This included not only the
aforementioned Joseph Wengler, but also Ludwig Merz, the head of the LRA, who
likewise expressed doubts whether reactor technology made for a suitable field of
application for reliability analysis.73 A paper co-authored by six of the most distinguished
reactor safety experts in 1970 dramatically referred to ‘determinists’ and ‘probabilists’ as
‘two enemy camps’ within the West German nuclear community.74
Despite these objections, quantitative risk analyses continued to gain ground in West
German reactor safety circles in the early 1970s, as an increasing number of publications
and research projects attests. One reason for this was internal to science and technology:
as more data, more sophisticated logical-mathematical models and more computing
power became available, probabilistic approaches became state of the art internationally.
The most visible sign of this was the Reactor Safety Study (WASH 1400), the first
comprehensive probabilistic risk analysis of a nuclear power plant worldwide, conducted
between 1972 and 1975 under the supervision of Norman Rasmussen for the USAEC.75
The Rasmussen study received intensive attention in almost all nations using nuclear
energy. In spite of the very public controversies following its release, it generally provided
an important boost to proponents of probabilistic approaches, whom it provided with
a template and a proof of principle. However, in contrast for example to the French
nuclear safety establishment, which welcomed Rasmussen’s results but did not undertake
any work itself, in the FRG, WASH-1400 helped to coagulate already existing minor
projects into a large-scale national research program.76 This divergence had at least partly
political reasons. A major part of the attraction and ambition of the extensive West
German risk research projects of the early 1970s had less to do with (global) technological
progress than with the societal (and hence national) side of the nuclear safety. Between
1970 and 1975, minor regional protests against nuclear power plants transformed into
a highly energized, nationwide mass movement, willing to resort to all kinds of legal and
extra-legal means – much to the surprise and dismay of nuclear experts, as well as the
Federal bureaucracy.77 Against this backdrop, the idea to ‘objectively prove’ the (relative)
safety of nuclear power plants through the introduction of quantitative criteria looked
more appealing than ever. It is therefore not surprising that some of the most enthusiastic
proponents of PRA were to be found in the state bureaucracy.78
In late 1972, an expert meeting at the newly created Ministry for Research and
Technology (BMFT) on ‘Quantitative Methods of Risk Assessment’ first mentioned the
idea of a cohesive ‘risk strategy’ as the ultimate goal of the hitherto still rather dispersed
research efforts in this field. Its aim was not only to achieve a comprehensive quantifica-
tion of the risk posed by nuclear plants as soon as possible, but also to prepare their
comparative evaluation and work towards the formulation of general risk thresholds.79
Over the next year and a half, the BMFT and the Ministry for the Interior (BMI), newly in
charge of reactor safety, developed this plan into a two-pronged, coordinated effort,
known as Projekt Risikostrategie (project risk strategy).80 On the one hand, the Ministry
of Research and Technology funded a major research effort directed at calculating and
quantifying as completely and exactly as possible the risks attached to the use of nuclear
power. Its centerpiece was the Deutsche Risikostudie (DRS), commissioned in early 1976
under the direction of Adolf Birkhofer, who had apparently changed his mind on the
merits of the probabilistic approach. Starting from the mandate to verify the applicability
of the results of the Rasmussen study to German conditions, the DRS quickly grew into
a complete risk analysis project in its own right.81 While the B unit of the Biblis nuclear
power plant (near Frankfurt) was chosen as the reference facility, the study aimed to
cover all large light-water reactors in the country. It drew together an enormous amount
of research (probabilistic and otherwise) by a number of private and public institutions,
touching on a wide range of topics and disciplines – from the reliability of certain types of
pipes through the computer simulation of a core meltdown, to the frequency and likely
consequences of earthquakes, floods and airplane crashes at specific sites.82 Not least
because of these expansionary tendencies, the project’s two phases, originally projected to
be completed by 1978, were not concluded until 1989.83 Still, the DRS, covering the
operational risk of light water reactors, was only a small part of the Ministry’s much more
ambitious original design, which aimed for a quantitative analysis of the complete fuel
cycle for different reactor types – not to mention the non-nuclear industry and a whole
range of other ‘life risks’ for comparative purposes.84
Parallel to the DRS, the Ministry of the Interior commissioned a second, complimen-
tary research effort to investigate the ‘non-technical side’ of a future risk strategy,
internally known as SR-70.85 Its original intention was to draw on disciplines like
psychology, sociology and political science to investigate ‘how risk numbers from risk
studies could be used as objective arguments in the safety discussion with the
population’.86 However, as its full title, ‘Survey of the Technical, Organizational and
Societal Preconditions for Risk Strategies in the Field of Technological Development’,
suggests, SR-70 soon grew into a much broader (if somewhat unsystematic) collection of
basic research on risk perception and risk communication in social and political
contexts.87 Criticizing that the study did not even take the necessity of nuclear energy
as a given, the study’s contractor, the social studies branch of the Battelle Institute in
Frankfurt, strongly insisted that their job was ‘not to deliver manipulation techniques to
push nuclear energy’, but rather to propose more democratic and equitable ways to
handle large-scale technological risks in society.88 Indeed, the final report delivered
a highly critical verdict on the ‘technocratic thinking’ behind the idea of using risk
analyses to ‘solve’ the problem of acceptance, and strongly emphasized the need for
additional research into political and societal processes and structures.89 In a certain way,
the work done in the framework of SR 70 therefore constitutes a sort of ‘missing link’
directly connecting the technical discourse on nuclear risk quantification of the 1970s to
the boom of sociological risk research in West Germany in the 1980s.
Arguing with numbers: quantification and its limits in the debate on nuclear
energy in the FRG
The history and scope of Projekt Risikostrategie make it clear that the whole program of
risk quantification in the West German nuclear discussion can and should be regarded as
an evidence practice aimed at far wider circles than solely the technical expert discourse.
While those responsible were careful to emphasize the technical benefits gained by
a better understanding of accident sequences and more balanced (or ‘homogenized’)
safety criteria, the use of numerical risk estimates in the public discussion was always
considered part of the package. ‘To make the risk of nuclear energy amenable to
a relativizing evaluation especially in comparison to other civilizational life risks’ was
considered, in the word of one ministerial aide in the BMI, ‘indispensable for an effective
political justification’ of the technology.90 Interested parties in the nuclear industry were
equally quick to pick up the new tool. A public relations brochure issued by the reactor
construction company KWU in 1975, for instance, transformed the Rasmussen study
into a colorful graphical illustration meant to illustrate the ostensibly minute scale of the
risk. A single black dot, representing a single human death from nuclear power use over
a time of 170 years, was lost in a sea of dots signifying fatalities from ‘conventional’
accidents like airplane crashes, fires or earthquakes.91
However, as officials were quite aware, the operationalization of probabilistic risk
analysis as an evidence practice carried its own risks. Opponents of nuclear power, who
were suffering from an evidence problem of their own as the dangers they were warning
against still remained largely hypothetical to the German population until the Chernobyl
disaster in 1986, eagerly adopted the numbers provided by nuclear experts.92
Unsurprisingly, however, they tended to pick out those numbers most damaging to the
nuclear enterprise, usually the maximum casualty estimates. Pirated copies of
a manuscript from Lindackers’ doctoral defense in 1970, in which he had calculated
a number of 33,000 to 1.67 million victims for a major accident at the proposed BASF
reactor, were among the most circulated documents of the anti-nuclear movement
during the early 1970s.93 The supposedly reassuring calculations of extremely low
accident probabilities, on the other hand, were widely dismissed as an attempt to cover
up the true danger. Having tried and failed to keep the alarming figures for potential
victims under wraps, the popular weekly Der Spiegel claimed in 1975, the nuclear
establishment had now resorted to the ‘trick’ of rendering them harmless through the
statistical maneuver of risk analysis.94 In a similar vein, Rüdiger Schäfer, professor of
mathematics at the University of Bremen and a prominent critic of atomic energy,
parodied the rush to numbers in the pro-nuclear community in the late 1970s by
introducing a new law of stochastics: ‘Risks are always then quantified by stating
probabilities’, his so-called ‘rule of probability in nuclear technology’ read, ‘whenever
dangers cannot be brought under control safely enough by either technical or adminis-
trative means’.95
That any probabilistic view was forced to admit some possibility of failure proved
perhaps even more problematic in legal contexts. Due to the structure of the regulative
system and the political divisions within the government on the issue, the courts took
a much more active role in the West German controversy on the risks of nuclear energy
than in other European countries.96 While there had always been doubts whether
probabilistic thinking would translate well into the legal language required for regulation
and licensing purposes, the question was forced by a series of administrative court cases
in the late 1970s. In 1977, the Freiburg administrative court ruled on a high-profile case
concerning the building permit for the nuclear power plant in Wyhl, arguably the most
iconic site of anti-nuclear protests in the FRG.97 The case turned on the question of
whether an additional burst protection for the reactor vessel should have been part of the
safety requirements. Less than a year before, after protracted deliberations, the RSK had
ended up demanding such a burst protection for the projected BASF plant, expressly
citing the increased ‘collective risk’ due to the high population density near the site.98 The
Freiburg court now wanted to know why the same should not also be required at Wyhl,
seeing that the citizens living there were entitled to the same legal protections. When the
experts of the Reactor Safety Commission were cross-examined in court on this issue,
they claimed in best ‘probabilistic’ diction that, while the consequences of a bursting
reactor vessel would be very serious, its likelihood was extremely low – but of course
larger than zero. The court took this as meaning that the accident in question ‘could not
be ruled out in principle’, as long as there was no additional burst protection. Hence, it
decided to revoke the permit.99
The very next day, taken aback by what could have proven a major setback for the
expansion of nuclear power in Germany, RSK experts and ministerial representatives
held a crisis meeting at the BMI. In light of the Wyhl decision, even Lindackers had to
admit that the concept of risk was evidently ‘hard to get across to the public’, which was
used to the promise of absolute safety.100 Still not ready to abandon the probabilistic
approach, he proposed to solve the problem by establishing legally binding thresholds for
acceptable additional risk. For his colleagues, however, this came dangerously close to
officially accepting the death of innocent citizens, which they thought politically unfea-
sible and possibly even unconstitutional. In their view, ‘the risk concept’ was simply ‘not
enforceable’.101 Instead, the RSK experts immediately reverted to deterministic thinking
and re-centered their argumentation around a new concept, which soon came to be called
‘basic safety’. German manufacturers, they now claimed, had reached such a high level of
production standards and quality control that a bursting reactor vessel could be com-
pletely excluded as a possibility.102 Only days later, the Schweinfurt administrative court,
deliberating an analogous lawsuit against the planned power station at Grafenrheinfeld,
declared itself convinced by this new line of argument. It ruled that an additional burst
protection was not necessary, and thus provided the desired precedent for overturning
the Wyhl decision.103
When ‘Phase A’ of the DRS was finally published in 1979, shortly after the first ‘global’
nuclear catastrophe at Three Mile Island,104 the pro-nuclear side did not expect it to do
much to further their cause. The text itself took care to clarify the limits of the results
presented, and even warned that a detailed analysis of possible catastrophes might attract
attention to them and make them ‘seem real’, thereby increasing rather than decreasing
public fears.105 A KWU brochure accompanying the release of the DRS warned against
the ‘particularities of the probabilistic methods’. Since the ‘frequency of occurrence of
even the most hypothetical event can never reach zero’, great care was to be taken in
arguing with the DRS numbers. In particular, the two constituting factors of risk,
probability and consequences, were never to be separated: ‘Otherwise, the paradoxical
situation could arise that a certain risk is objectively proven to be minimal, but due to the
fixation on the consequences of the maximum accident fear of it is increased by this very
proof’.106 The head of the company’s nuclear division, Wolfgang Braun, admitted in
retrospect that his company had been especially apprehensive of the DRS’s calculation of
up to 15,500 instant and 104,000 possible ‘delayed’ deaths resulting from a nuclear
accident. Numbers like these, they had assumed, would ‘roll like a clap of thunder
through the Republic’. To his surprise, this was ‘not at all the case’.107 When the DRS
was published in 1979, it seemed at first reasonably successful at calming the waters. An
article in the usually nuclear-critical Der Spiegel conceded that opposition to nuclear
power was waning and likely to be subdued even more by the study.108 Meanwhile, the
board of the SR 70 study, deliberating ‘what to do with the DRS’, came to the conclusion
that ‘the probabilistic method, the concepts of risk and probabilities are evidently not
understood by the wider population, but a concretization of accidents does have
a calming effect’.109
Even the reaction of anti-nuclear activists was not as uniformly negative as some had
feared. An official ‘statement’ by the Bremer Arbeits- und Umweltschutzzentrum (Bremen
Center for Workplace and Environmental Safety), evidently modelled on the scientific
ripostes that had done considerable damage to the Rasmussen report, did its best to pull
the DRS to pieces, calling it ‘scientifically speaking at best a bad interim report’.110
However, as an internal overview of reactions for the BMI was quick to point out,
while the statement harshly criticized the quality of data, the completeness of the analysis
and especially the trustworthiness of those in charge, it did not question the usefulness of
risk analysis as such.111 The same can essentially be said of the much more thorough
review of the DRS by the Öko-Institut Freiburg, arguably the most scientifically compe-
tent of the German anti-nuclear groups, prepared with official funding from the BMFT in
1980/81.112 This shared belief in PRA as a basis for discussion also extended to the level of
parliamentary politics. The so-called Enquete-Kommission Zukünftige Energiepolitik,
a bipartisan parliamentary commission on energy policy set up in early 1979 in order
to regain the lost ‘consensus’ on nuclear energy, still showed itself very much convinced
of the idea that ‘objective’ comparative risk assessments of different energy sources could
serve as a path towards a rational compromise. At the same time, however, the commis-
sion found it necessary to back away from an exclusive focus on numerical risk, which the
‘anti-nuclear’ faction amongst its members found unacceptable. Instead, it advised the
combining of risk figures with an assessment of maximum possible damage, as well as
a catalogue of qualitative criteria.113 Nevertheless, regarding the issue that had triggered
the appointment of the commission in the first place, the controversy over the German
fast breeder reactor (SNR-300), compromise proved beyond reach. Following the express
wish of the ‘anti-nuclear’ faction, the committee commissioned a risk analysis to compare
the dangers posed by the breeder with the risk of light water reactors as established by the
DRS. The report, finished in 1982, was to be done as a so-called ‘parallel study’, involving
two groups of scientists working independently from each other. One, made up of figures
from the reactor safety ‘establishment’, worked under Birkhofer at the GRS. The other,
comprised of ‘critics’, was lead by the physicist and ‘nuclear critic’ Jochen Benecke.114
The conflict between the two groups contributed substantially to the impossibility of
finding a common line in the final recommendations, each group citing their own study
as evidence and attacking the other’s as untrustworthy. Ultimately, the situation was
resolved politically. The take-over by a Conservative-led government in the fall of 1982
meant that the pro-breeder camp carried the day, restabilizing for the moment the
‘establishment’s’ version of the risks involved.115
By this time, the high hopes the nuclear industry had held for probabilistic risk
analyses only a decade before had mostly evaporated. When a seminar held by the
newly founded German Society for Safety Science (GfS) in 1983 took stock of the
experiences with the new method in the nuclear field, the mood was rather sobering.
In particular the representatives of the nuclear industry, who had been the most ardent
supporters of probabilistic approaches fifteen years before, now seemed highly skeptical.
The chair of the meeting, Wolfgang Braun of the reactor construction company KWU,
warmly welcomed an apparent break in what he scathingly referred to as the ‘attempts to
suffuse not only the long-suffering nuclear industry, but also big chemical companies
with risk analyses’.116 Participants agreed that while probabilistic approaches had been
useful in modifying some safety requirements, the absolute numbers they produced were
not reliable at all, making cross-comparisons between different industries and the
introduction of absolute risk limits not only impossible, but also fundamentally undesir-
able. In a direct reversal of their position in the late 1960s, industry representatives now
propagated trust in experts instead of trust in numbers. The responsibility of experts and
regulators to exercise their discretion, Braun claimed, should ‘not be dumped on anon-
ymous computer programs’.117
The shock of the Chernobyl disaster on 26 April 1986 served to deepen the split
perception of PRA in the FRG. For the anti-nuclear movement, the accident seemed to
provide strong evidence against the credibility of risk calculations. As Joachim Radkau,
Germany’s first nuclear historian, claimed in a Spiegel interview shortly after the accident,
Chernobyl had proven ‘that the manner in which the atomic risk is transformed into
nothingness by the way of probabilistic calculations is pseudo-scientific humbug’.118 In
a longer contribution to a collected volume that same year, Radkau seemed to excoriate
the more ‘intellectual’ nuclear critics – including possibly himself – for being willing to
‘play the game’ of probabilistics at all: ‘After Chernobyl, some pieces of vulgar anti-
nuclear literature of the 70s seem more realistic than the number games and curve
diagrams on ‘residual risk’.119 In the same volume, Rudolf von Woldeck advised readers
to ‘beware of probabilities’.120 In 1987, the Sachverständigenrat (expert commission) of
the West German Parliament cast general doubts on the feasibility of risk comparisons
between different energy generation alternatives, not least because it found the band of
error in quantitative estimations ‘not satisfactory’. At the same time, it supported the
‘increased employment of probabilistic methods as an instrument in safety assessments
of nuclear facilities’, because it could serve to discover weaknesses.121 As a reaction to
Chernobyl, the West German authorities instituted a ‘periodical safety examination’ of
German power plants, which was to take place every 10 years. This also included a risk
analysis, which thus officially became part of FRG safety procedures for the first time.122
Risk in socialism: PRA as evidence practice in the GDR

The GDR’s forays into risk analysis were considerably less extensive than those of their
capitalist neighbor. Nevertheless, they show a number of structural similarities, while at
the same time following a notably different chronology. Largely out of deference to the
Soviet Union, the development of any kind of independent research into nuclear safety
was neglected even more completely than in the FRG throughout the 1960s. It was only
when the Soviets declined to take over complete responsibility as a general contractor for
the construction of the GDR’s second nuclear power station at Lubmin near Greifswald
in 1967 that East German experts became more vocal in demanding a more systematic
approach to the topic – not without immediately exposing themselves to charges of
professing an ‘anti-Soviet’ attitude.123 Institutional preconditions improved in subse-
quent years with the establishment of academic research centers, and especially the
upgrading of the SZS to the somewhat better equipped and more powerful Staatliches
Amt für Atomsicherheit und Strahlenschutz (SAAS) in 1973.124 Nevertheless, with a few
sporadic exceptions, the international discussion on probabilistic approaches seems to
have made little impression on the GDR expert discourse before the mid-1970s.125
In the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the engagement with
probabilistic methods was stimulated by a series of developments. On the one hand, the
progress of the GDR’s atomic program led to a heightened interest in research on
reliability and availability, which had also served as a first step in the direction of risk
analysis in West Germany. In reaction to a series of malfunctions and breakdowns, which
bedeviled the Soviet-built reactors in Greifswald almost immediately after their
commissioning in 1975/6, the industrial research institute ORGREB of the union of state
owned enterprises (VVB) for power plants commissioned a reliability analysis
(‘Havariewahrscheinlichkeitsanalyse’126) of the two blocks already in operation at this
point.127 Aside from the collection of reliability data, this also required the development
of suitable computer programs, which would start to yield results in the early 1980s.128 At
the same time, members of a newly founded industry-wide working group on “nuclear
plant safety” began to collect data for computing reliability figures in 1980.129 Apush by
the party leadership for the construction of nuclear heating plants from 1978 onwards
gave new urgency to the question of siting – not unlike the BASF-project had in the FRG
a decade earlier. This prompted Ernst Adam, professor of reactor-technology at TU
Dresden, to call publicly for risk research.130 In 1983, the increasing interest in the topic
led the Physicists’ Society to devote their annual meeting to ‘reliability and availability’.
A special issue of Kernenergie, the GDR’s leading professional journal on nuclear energy,
published many of the contributions to this meeting in a special issue in 1984.131 At the
same time, the first large-scale Western studies also drew the attention of East German
experts towards probabilistics. Shortly after the publication of the Rasmussen report in
1975, the SAAS’s Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger subjected it to a detailed evaluation for the
benefit of his colleagues. While Krüger criticized the shortcomings of the report, espe-
cially the inherent uncertainty of its results caused by insufficient data and poor model-
ling, he also commended the study as a pioneering effort and proof of principle that
would ‘strongly influence and advance’ reactor safety.132 While the release of the West
German DRS in 1979 did not prompt a similarly thorough analysis, Georg Sitzlack, the
president of the SAAS, took it upon himself to inform the Politburo member for the
economy, Günther Mittag, personally about this new development.133
However, neither Krüger nor Sitzlack directly suggested the possibility of doing
similar work in the GDR in their statements. In spite of the newfound interest in the
related topic of reliability, risk analysis remained suspect to the majority of East German
experts. In addition to a number of technical objections, which were largely similar to
those raised by some of their West German colleagues, they were also worried about the
potentially unsettling political implications the new method could have in the context of
the GDR. Firstly, risk quantification smacked dangerously of capitalist cost-benefit
analysis. In an article in Kernenergie in 1979, which sounded much less positive on the
subject of risk quantification than his earlier report on the Rasmussen study, Krüger
bluntly stated that ‘methods and results of risk evaluations [were] not socio-economically
indifferent’. Their ‘uncritical adaption from the field of bourgeois economics into socia-
list conditions’ was hence ‘not justifiable’.134 Secondly, by conceding the possibility of
major accidents, risk analysis also had the potential of undermining existing Soviet safety
philosophies, which were based on the idea that careful engineering and superior
qualification and motivation of plant personnel would prevent major accidents. This
comes across most clearly in the statements made by Klaus Fuchs, the former atomic spy
and one of the most distinguished figures in GDR nuclear circles. In his contribution to
the above-mentioned 1983 Physicists’ Society meeting, titled ‘On the Reliability of
Nuclear Power Plants’, Fuchs strongly criticized risk quantification and risk comparison
as evidence practices for safety, dismissing the ‘multiplication of very large damages with
extremely low probabilities’ as ‘mathematical nonsense’. In his view, quantifying ‘residual
risk’ was mainly a way to ‘dodge the responsibility’ of preventing large accidents from
happening in the first place.135 Fuchs went on to attack the idea of risk comparison with
an openly political argument. ‘With which risk’, he asked, ‘should this “residual risk” be
compared? Who can quantify the risk arising from the failure to come to terms with the
global energy problem in a world which is still far away from the implementation of
social security and justice for all nations?’136
The catastrophe at Chernobyl fundamentally changed the situation. It radically desta-
bilized the hitherto existing evidence practices built on the proclaimed superiority of the
Soviet approach to nuclear safety and substantially reduced ideologically motivated
reservations against risk analyses. The official Soviet report on the accident, which was
presented at the meeting of the Scientific Council for Fundamental Research in
Energetics (WREG) five months after the catastrophe, tried to restore faith in Soviet
reactor technology by depicting the catastrophe as a result of human error under
extraordinary circumstances. By directly contradicting the official safety strategy of
reliance on qualified operators in the interest of rehabilitating the reputation of Soviet
technology, this effectively freed East German experts to voice their own criticism as well.
Furthermore, Soviet experts announced their intention to explore accidents which had so
far been considered as purely ‘hypothetical’, such as the one at Chernobyl, implying the
use of probabilistic methods.137
In combination with a drastic increase of the available resources for reactor safety
research in the aftermath of the disaster,138 the shock of Chernobyl therefore triggered
a belated embrace of risk analysis in the GDR. In early 1987, Manfred Mertins of the
SAAS presented a concrete work schedule for laying the foundations for a risk assessment
of the GDR’s WWER-440 reactors, which aimed to perform accident sequence analyses,
determine component reliability data and create requisite algorithms until the end of
the year.139 This was accompanied by an international effort to establish probabilistic
reactor safety assessment across the socialist countries headed by the IAEA,140 as well as
through bi- and multilateral cooperation with the FRG.141 Ultimately, the actual results
of these efforts remained rather limited. In the context of the IAEA program, it soon
emerged that even among Comecon countries, the GDR was notable for the sorry state of
its risk analysis program, which had never made it beyond what was classified as ‘level 0ʹ,
i.e. basic reliability analysis.142
At the same time, Chernobyl had a second, arguably even more potent effect on
evidence practices for nuclear safety in the GDR. The formation of an increasingly vocal
opposition to nuclear power, which started to take the form of a critical counter-public
that could no longer be easily marginalized by coercion, meant that the discussion on
nuclear risk and safety could no longer remain restricted to technical experts and political
functionaries.143 This made the need for new evidence practices even more urgent. At the
aforementioned 1986 WREG meeting, Klaus Fuchs reported on a first, tentative effort to
engage in a dialogue on nuclear power with representatives of the churches, which he had
undertaken at the request of the political leadership.144 However, the aim of this initiative
was mostly to avoid a generalized public discussion of the issue and ‘religious wars’ of the
sort seen in the FRG, as Fuchs stated openly. Discussing means to maintain their
authority, the gathered experts specifically agreed to avoid at all costs a debate on
‘residual risk’, which might lead to an admission that severe accidents were possible in
the GDR as well.145 In spite of their efforts, exactly such a discussion was prompted by
publication of Christa Wolf’s novel Störfall in 1987.146 The book had a galvanizing effect
on the conversation around nuclear risk in East Germany and resulted in a year-long
controversy between scientists of different disciplines on the risks of nuclear energy in the
journal Spectrum.147
Against this backdrop, the concept of risk was now taken up by the social sciences and
humanities as well. In an article published in 1988, one of the country’s leading philoso-
phers of science, Herbert Hörz, admitted that his discipline had not taken sufficient note of
the concept and tried to rectify this situation.148 He attempted to defuse the delicate
question of the relativization of the safety guarantee proffered by the socialist state by
distinguishing a number of different subcategories, such as ‘success risk’ (Erfolgsrisiko),
‘hazard risk’ (Gefahrenrisiko), ‘behavioural risk’ (Verhaltensrisiko) and ‘accompanying
risk’ (Begleitrisiko), which had less negative or even outright positive connotations, avoid-
ing loaded terms like the ‘residual risk’. As Hörz had intended, his contribution triggered
a lively scholarly discussion on technological risks.149 However, as a number of the
contributions ended with a call for democratically achieved agreements on technological
choices and risks, the debate revealed how profoundly the concept of risk challenged the
East German welfare dictatorship.150 Hörz’s efforts to establish a specifically socialist notion
of risk collapsed with the end of the GDR shortly afterwards.151
Conclusion
Probabilistic Risk Analysis made its entrance in German technical expert circles, as well
as in the public discourse, primarily as an evidence practice for nuclear safety. Although
earlier, deterministic methods had numerous obvious problems from a technical stand-
point, and although reliability calculations for certain subsystems were already more or
less standard procedure by the end of the 1960s, engineers and technicians in both
German states were not easily convinced of the merits of using probabilistic numbers
as a yardstick for safety. Probabilistic approaches mostly became attractive when pre-
viously dominant deterministic procedures for providing evidence for reactor safety
began to be publicly contested. An important driving force behind their adoption were
bureaucrats and public officials, who turned to the calculation of risks in the hope of
restoring their own authority with the help of the clean and unambiguous language of
numbers. However, it soon turned out that the evidence provided by numbers was far
from being clear and uncontested. Apart from the complexities of calculating figures and
developing models, the problem with calculated risk numbers was that they could not be
communicated as such, but required interpretation by comparison. The need to compare,
however, reintroduced ambiguity into the numbers. Moreover, the recourse to probabil-
istic thinking itself served to create an illusion of safety by making uncertainty calculable,
and thus seemingly manageable. However, this came at the price of abandoning the
promise of complete, deterministic technical safety – with far-reaching societal and
political consequences. On the Western side of the iron curtain, the anti-nuclear move-
ments, and also parts of the legal system, took exception to the idea of relative safety,
prompting a partial return to deterministic approaches among nuclear experts. On the
Eastern side, in addition to the severe lack of resources, the relativizing effect of risk
comparisons was even more problematic, as it threatened the legitimacy of the welfare
dictatorship by calling the state’s promise of safety into question. Only when the
Chernobyl catastrophe destroyed the previously pursued evidence practices for the safety
of Soviet reactor technology, did the risk approach appear as a last resort to reestablish
evidence for nuclear safety. In the end, however, this move accelerated the implosion of
the GDR.
Although the Chernobyl disaster was widely seen as ultimate evidence for the defi-
ciency of quantitative risk analysis by parts of the anti-nuclear movement, neither the
1986 accident nor the catastrophe at Fukushima-Daiichi a quarter of a century later led to
the abandonment of the method. On the contrary, in Germany and around the world,
PRA has not only firmly established itself as a part of the internationally accepted
standard technical toolkit for assessing and assuring safety in the nuclear field, but also
spread to many other technical fields.152 On the one hand, this has to do with the fact that
the method has proven very useful in providing a more detailed understanding of the
exact operations and processes in complex technical systems, thus offering a basis for
substantial safety improvements. On the other hand, its success is also the result of
technological momentum. The mobilization and institutionalization of all the resources
that were and are necessary to compile and process all the numbers for conducting a PRA
has led to the creation of an infrastructure that tends to perpetuate itself. In the process,
most of the hopes and ambitions initially connected to the social and political use of the
approach have officially been abandoned. Since the early 1990s, IAEA manuals on PRA
warn of ‘exaggerated claims’ concerning the degree of certainty achieved and the poten-
tial ‘misapplication’ of their results in the political process.153
Nevertheless, probability numbers are still widely used to support political decisions –
occasionally even by those who want to make the case against nuclear technology. When
the German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepped in front of the German parliament in
July 2011 to explain her government’s surprising change of heart on the question of
nuclear energy in the wake of the disaster at Fukushima, risk analyses were at the heart of
her argument.154 As she explained in her speech, her fear was not that a similar accident
might take place in Germany, where earthquakes or tsunamis of this magnitude were
very unlikely to occur. The real issue at stake, she explained, was ‘the reliability of risk
assumptions and the reliability of probability analyses. Because these analyses provide the
foundation, based on which politicians must make decisions’.155 Fukushima, in other
words, made it impossible to continue using nuclear power – not because it proved that
German nuclear reactors were unsafe, but because it undermined the credibility of
(probabilistic) risk analysis. This somewhat surprising line of reasoning illustrates how
integral the quantitative and statistical ‘style of reasoning’ has become to the German
discussion on nuclear power.156 Analogous to what recent works have found on the
history of numerical and mathematical models in economics, quantitative risk analysis
fulfilled not only representative, but also performative functions: Rather than just being
descriptions of the ‘real world’, they also tend to influence it by shaping perceptions and
practices. In the end, at least to the historical actors invested in them, models may
become almost indistinguishable from reality.157
Notes
1. Radkau, Technik in Deutschland, 372–3.
2. Balogh, Chain Reaction, arguably provides the most detailed historical exploration of this
dynamic, using the United States as a case study. For the FRG see e.g. Weisker,
“Expertenvertrauen gegen Zukunftsangst”; for Switzerland, see Kupper, “Expertise und

Risiko, Vertrauen und Macht”.
3. Beck, Risikogesellschaft, 76–95; 254–99. On Beck’s concept in the perspective of historical
research cf. Boudia and Jas, “Risk and ‘Risk Society’ in Historical Perspective.”
4. Beck, Risikogesellschaft, 73–4.
5. In recent technical literature, PRA seems to be the preferred term in North America, while
in the European context PSA is more common. German nuclear specialists in the period
under discussion here for the most part simply referred to “Risikoanalysen” (risk analyses),
which were implicitly understood to be probabilistic.
6. Cf. e.g. Karin Zachmann, “Risk in Historical Perspective,” 19–20; Rip, “The Mutual
Dependence of Risk Research and Political Context”; Perkins, “Development of Risk
Assessment for Nuclear Power”; Keller and Modarres, “A Historical Overview of
Probabilistic Risk Assessment Development.” Besides nuclear power, a second important
field for the development of PRA was health and environmental policy; cf. Boudia,
“Managing Scientific and Political Uncertainty”; Boudia and Jas, Gouverner un monde
toxique, esp. 53–74.
7. For an overview over the philosophical discussion cf. e.g. Chandler, Davidson and
Harootunian, Questions of Evidence; Kelly, “Evidence.”
8. Our notion of evidence practices is thus closely related (but not quite equivalent) to Nancy
Cartwright’s concept of “evidence for use,” cf. Cartwright, “Well-Ordered Science.”
9. We would like to thank Sarah Blacker for conceptual discussions on this point. It is from her
work that we have borrowed the concept of enactment and re-enactment of evidence
practices; cf. Blacker, Warding off Disease and Blacker, “Tactical Translation.”
10. Heintz, “Numerische Differenz.”
11. Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.”
12. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking; Porter, Trust in Numbers; see also Krüger, Daston
and Heidelberger, The Probabilistic Revolution; Hacking, The Taming of Chance;
Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers; and Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood.
13. Porter, Trust in Numbers, ix.
14. Cf. Bouk, How Our Days became Numbered; Pietruska, Looking Forward; and Deringer,
Calculated Values.
15. Cf. (in addition to the literature cited in FN 6 above) Carlisle, “Probabilistic Risk Assessment
in Nuclear Reactors”; Garrick and Christie, “Probabilistic Risk Assessment Practice in the
USA for Nuclear Power Plants”; Keller and Modarres, “A Historical Overview of
Probabilistic Risk Assessment Development”; and Wellock, “A Figure of Merit.”
16. On the latter cf. Kirchhof and Meyer, “Global Protest against Nuclear Power”; Tompkins,
Better Active than Radioactive!; and Milder, Greening Democracy; for an example of the
former Boudia, “Global Regulation.”
17. There is very little research on non-U.S. risk research in the nuclear context. For an
interesting contemporary snapshot of different national contexts cf. Kasperson and
Kasperson, Nuclear Risk Analysis in Comparative Perspective. Some details of the West
German program are discussed in Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke,
651–84; for the French case cf. Foasso, Atomes sous surveillance, 305–24; and Goumri,
“Making the Accident Hypothetical.” Even less researched is the role of international
institutions such as the Internatinal Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) at Laxenburg, or the Joint Nuclear
Research Centre (JNRC) of the European Community in Ispra, all of which had research
groups working on nuclear risk quantification at some point.
18. Cf. already Conze, “Sicherheit, Schutz.” There is now a growing body of literature on the
history of safety/security, particularly in the German context; cf. E. Conze, Die Suche nach
Sicherheit; Zwierlein, “Sicherheitsgeschichte”; and Daase, “Die Historisierung der
Sicherheit.” On nuclear energy and national identity see Hecht, The Radiance of France.
19. For a placement of the West German program in the international context cf. Dooley et al.,
(1987). “The Emergence of Risk,” 2–3.
20. The formulation goes back to Kleßmann, “Konturen einer integrierten

Nachkriegsgeschichte.”
21. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 8.
22. Jarausch, Dictatorship as Experience.
23. Cf. Hunnius and Kliemt, “Risiko als soziale Konstruktion.” On the specific importance of
safety/security under communist rule see Lindenberger, “‘Havarie’,” 306.
24. For the FRG, cf. Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975;
Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2 vols.), as well as
specifically for safety matters Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke. For the
GDR, see Abele, Kernkraft in der DDR; Abele, Liewers and Barkleit, Zur Geschichte der
Kernenergie in der DDR; Reichert, Kernenergiewirtschaft in der DDR.; and Müller, Geschichte
der Kernenergie in der DDR. For a combined account of the development in both Germanys
see now also Augustine, Taking on Technocracy.
25. On the important post-war role of Heisenberg in particular, not only in the scientific context
but also in the public arena, see now Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age.
26. For the war-time program cf. Walker, German national socialism and the Quest for
Nuclear Power. The relevant legal documents for the occupation-era ban can be found
in reprint in the appendix to Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland, 632–49.
27. On the history of nuclear energy development in Germany after 1945, including the early
phase, see Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft; Müller, Geschichte der
Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (vol. 1); Reichert, Kernenergiewirtschaft in
der DDR; and Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der DDR.
28. This policy was explicitly formulated for the US in 1950 in U.S. Atomic Energy Commission,
Summary Report of Reactor Safeguards Committee (WASH-3).
29. On the epistemology of technical knowledge see Technikwissenschaften; Wengenroth, “Von
der unsicheren Sicherheit zur sicheren Unsicherheit”; Petroski, To engineer is Human; and
Petroski, To Forgive Design.
30. Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 104. For a very similar formulation by a British
official see Hinton, “British Developments in Atomic Energy,” 10.
31. Luntz, “How Safe is Safe?”.
32. An overview of the bodies involved can be found in Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in
der DDR, 21–52.
33. Albrecht and Schimmel, “Genehmigungsverfahren für Kernanlagen,” 80–2. The importance
of the licensing process can be gauged by the fact that there was no responsible body for
issuing licenses at all between 1965 and 1967, i.e. during the time when the first power
reactor in Rheinsberg started operating. The previously tasked Volkswirtschaftsrat had been
abolished in 1965, and the responsibility was only reassigned to the SZS in 1967; cf. Müller,
Geschichte der Kernenergie in der DDR, 273.
34. Although the GDR had initially fostered plans for independent reactor development, its
leadership decided to abandon this path in 1962 and subsequently imported complete plants
ready-for-use from the Soviet Union, cf. ibid., 155–81; and Reichert, Kernenergiewirtschaft
in der DDR, 176–247.
35. On the Soviet approach to nuclear safety cf. Schmid, Producing Power, 90–2.
36. Reichert, Kernenergiewirtschaft in der DDR, 360; and Abele, Kernkraft in der DDR, 73–5.
37. For a condensed version of this argument, cf. Fuchs, “Über die Zuverlässigkeit von
Kernkraftwerken.” It bears emphasizing that this idealized picture of responsible and
competent crews was in constant conflict not only with the more prosaic daily reality on
the ground, but also with the widespread practice of ascribing blame for accidents to
individuals as a way to deflect blame from state institutions. Both factors together explain
the sometimes very harsh crticism of operating crews in internal reports; cf. Augustine,
Taking on Technocracy, 62–6; for a collection of quotes Kohler, Bestandsaufnahme und
Perspektiven der Atom. und Energiewirtschaft der DDR, part III, 12–4.
38. Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975, 347–50.
39. Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 203–41; and Laufs,
Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 82–91.
40. Gesetz über die friedliche Verwendung der Kernenergie und den Schutz gegen ihre
Gefahren (AtG) §7, Bundesgesetzblatt Jahrgang 1959, Teil I, p. 816 [translation by the
authors]. The adoption of the Atomgesetz took so long that interim legal solutions at the
state level had to be found to make the construction of the first reactors possible at all; cf.
Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 528–65.
41. At least initially, the RSK had considerable problems to assert its authority, cf. Radkau,
Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975, 404–10. For a concise overview
over the various bodies involved in West German nuclear safety cf. Müller, Geschichte der
Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 182–95.
42. Wiesenack, “The Activities of the German Technische Überwachungs-Vereine.” On the
TÜVs, a characteristic feature of German industrial safety since the mid-19th century, cf.
Sonnenberg, Hundert Jahre Sicherheit; Wiesenack, Wesen und Geschichte der Technischen
Überwachungsvereine.
43. The main agents of knowledge transfer in this instance were the two big West German
reactor construction companies, AEG and Siemens, who cooperated directly with their
American equivalents, General Electric (GE) and Westinghouse. The first boiling water
reactor (BWR), the Versuchsatomkraftwerk Kahl, was built by AEG/GE between 1958 and
1961; its pressurized water (PWR) equivalent, the Mehrzweckforschungsreaktor Karlsruhe,
was constructed by Siemens under license from Westinghouse between 1962 and
1965 (Müller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 258–66;
354–63).
44. In contrast to the English term, the German “GAU” later became notorious far beyond
technical circles; cf. Radkau, “Der ‘Größte Anzunehmende Unfall.” For an overview of the
actual appearance of the concept (in varying translations) in licensing documents over the
course of the early 1960s see Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 262–6.
45. On the origins of the MCA in the American siting discussion cf. Okrent, Nuclear Reactor
Safety, 32–4.
46. E. G. Case, “Principles and Practices in Reviewing Hazards Summary Reports.”
47. For a comparison of MCA-definitions across different countries see Kellermann, “Accident
Analysis as the Basis of Technical Examination.”
48. On details on the development of containment technology in the USA and the FRG cf.
Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 275–446.
49. Franzen, “Zum Genehmigungsverfahren für Kernkraftwerke,” 96.
50. Cf. International Atomic Energy Agency, Reactor Safety and Hazard Evaluation Techniques.
It is certainly not a coincidence that the MCA concept posed particularly serious problems
for the reactor designs used in Canada and the UK, which were more voluminous and hence
lent themselves much less easily to the use of containment shells as a countermeasure.
51. Farmer, “Siting Criteria,” 304. A very similar approach had already been proposed by
Siddall, “Statistical Analysis of Reactor Safety Standards”; cf. also Laurence, “Operating
Nuclear Reactors Safely”; Yamada, “Safety Evaluation of Nuclear Power Plants.” As Wellock,
“A Figure of Merit,” 682–9, shows, there was also an internal discussion on risk quantifica-
tion in the USA around the Plutonium production reactors at Hanford in the 1950s. Since it
was kept secret, however, it did not play a role in the international context.
52. In other words, Farmer proposed what amounted to a form of fault tree analysis.
53. Starr, “Social Benefit versus Technological Risk.”
54. Randers, “For a Planned Society – And Why Not?”.
55. Siddall’s paper, for instance, was translated into German immediately and could be read
by RSK members almost a year before it was published in Nucleonics, cf. Maßstäbe der
Reaktorsicherheit. Übers. von Ralf Friese, April 1958, in: DMA NL 111 Maier-Leibnitz,
146.
56. Seipel, “Diskussion über das Konzept des Größten Anzunehmenden Unfalls,” 178. Similar
criticism was voiced at a meeting in Basle shortly before; cf. Seipel, “Standortwahl,
Unfallanalyse und andere Sicherheitsfragen bei Kernreaktoren”; Wiesenack, “Entwicklung

der Sicherheitsphilosophie nach dem Modell des GAU.”
57. Seipel, “Diskussion über das Konzept des Größten Anzunehmenden Unfalls,” 178.
58. Ibid. Klaus Traube, a former the nuclear expert turned critic, claimed retrospectively that he
and his colleagues had been “shocked” by Farmer’s proposals because “they contained
deaths from nuclear energy,” a fact that his peers allegedly had not dared to voice aloud
before; Hauff, Expertengespräch Reaktorsicherheitsforschung, 113–4.
59. Ibid., 178.
60. Cf. Krause, 10 Jahre Laboratorium für Reaktorregelung und Anlagensicherung (LRA).
61. The earliest paper published on this topic seems to be Gieseler, “Eine Methode zur
Berechnung der Zuverlässigkeit von Reaktor-Sicherheitssystemen.”
62. Zachmann, “Risk in Historical Perspective,” 16–8. For an informative account of the
development of reliability analysis in the US by one of its historical protagonists, see
Ryerson, “The Reliability and Quality Control Field.”
63. For an overview of the work at LRA see the bibliography in Krause, 10 Jahre Laboratorium
für Reaktorregelung und Anlagensicherung (LRA).
64. Cf. Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975, 376–82.
65. Ergebnisprotokoll über die Sitzung der RSK, 24.10.1969, BArch B 138/3449: “MinDirig
Dr. Schuster weist darauf hin, in der BRD habe man sich bisher bei der Beurteilung von
KKW im wesentlichen an den Stand der US-amerikanischen Wissenschaft und Technik
gehalten, wobei in letzter Zeit auf einigen Teilgebieten auch die englischen
Wahrscheinlichkeitsüberlegungen bei der Sicherheitsbeurteilung berücksichtigt wurden. Die
BRD unterscheide sich jedoch in politischer und geographischer Hinsicht und was ihre
Bevölkerungsdichte betrifft von allen anderen Industrienationen. Deswegen halte er es für
nötig, daß das BMwF mit Hilfe der RSK eine eigene ‘Sicherheitsphilosophie’ für Deutschland
erarbeite.”
66. The matter was first discussed at the 53rd meeting of the RSK on 13 October 1969 (BArch
B 138/3449); the RSK finally concluded its deliberations at the 112th meeting on
28 April 1976 (BArch B 106/75317).
67. Thus Kornbichler (AEG); very similar pronounciations were made by Jannsen (KKW
Stade), Keller (Siemens), and Marnet (Brown, Boveri & Cie). Once more, they were
countered by Wengler’s insistence that probability needed large numbers; Niederschrift
des Podiumsgesprächs zur Sicherheit standortunabhängiger Kernkraftwerke, Düsseldorf,
5.11.1968, BArch B 138/5281.
68. Sicherheitsplan für die Errichtung und den Betrieb von Kernkraftwerken. Referat von Herrn
Direktor Dipl.–Phys. Karl-Heinz Lindackers, TÜV Rheinland, anläßlich des Gespräches über
Grundsatzfragen der Reaktorsicherheit am 6. November 1969 im BMwF, BArch B 106/52527.
69. Ibid.
70. Cf. the discussion in Kurzprotokoll über das Gespräch “Grundsatzfragen der
Reaktorsicherheit,” 6.11.1969, p. 8 and 5, BArch B 106/52527. Almost equally skeptical
were his RSK-colleagues Schütze und Zuelke; Merz and Wengler were invited but did not
attend the meeting.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Merz, “Philosophie des Reaktorschutzes.”
74. Birkhofer et al., “Reaktorsicherheit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.”
75. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Council, Reactor Safety Study. An Assessment of Accident Risks in
US Commercial Nuclear Power Plants. WASH-1400, NUREG 75/014, cf. Wellock, “A
Figure of Merit,” 678–721.
76. While the regulatory branch of the French nuclear establishment generally professed itself
impressed by Rasmussen’s work, the reactors’ operator, the state-own utilities company
EDF, seems to have successfully resisted all attempts to carry out a full PRA on a nuclear
power plant until the 1990s; cf. Foasso, Atomes sous surveillance, 305–24; and Goumri,
“Making the Accident Hypothetical.”
77. On the West German anti-nuclear movement cf. Engels, Naturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik;
Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest; Radkau, The Age of Ecology; and Schüring,
“Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat.”
78. For example, Hans Georg Seipel, Referent für Reaktorsicherheit at the Interior Ministry
(BMI) and one of the chief architects of Projekt Risikostrategie, called himself an „enthu-
siastic supporter” of Farmer’s risk model, which he first encountered as a participant in
a safety course in Harwell; cf. Hauff, Expertengespräch Reaktorsicherheitsforschung, 119.
79. Entwurf Ergebnisprotokoll: Quantative Methoden der Sicherheitsbeurteilung,
19 December 1972, BArch B 106/52527.
80. The responsibility for reactor safety was transferred from the BMBW to the Ministry of the
Interior (BMI) in December 1972, with the exception of reactor safety research, which came
under the authority of the newly founded BMFT. Projekt Risikostrategie was coordinated by
the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Risiko” on the part of the BMI, and the “Arbeitskreis Risiko und
Zuverlässigkeit” of the BMFT, which held their first (joint) meeting on 29 March 1974; cf.
BArch B 106/52529. In addition, the RSK also instituted a ‘Ausschuss Risikoanalyse’, cf.
Protokoll 99. Sitzung, 13.11.1974, BArch B 106/75313. At this point, the basic design of the
project was already in place; cf. Rahmenprogramm für die Entwicklung von quantitativen
Methoden zur Sicherheitsbeurteilung von Kernkraftwerken, P. Kafka, MRR – I – 16, März
1974; and Technische Risiken kerntechnischer Anlagen und ihre Perzeption
Arbeitsvorschlag des Battelle Instituts, Juli 1974, BArch 106/52530.
81. Cf. Birkhofer and Heuser, “Zielsetzung und Stand der deutschen Risikostudie”; as well as the
project proposal in: Risikoanalyse deutscher Kernkraftwerke analog zur Rasmussen-Studie,
BArch B 196/36192.
82. Cf. Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS): Deutsche Risikostudie Kernkraftwerke. In
addition, eight “Fachbände” (specialized volumes) were published in 1980 and 1981.
83. Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS), Deutsche Risikostudie Kernkraftwerke, Phase B.
84. Besprechungsbericht 3. AK Risiko, 26.2.1975, BArch B 106/52530.
85. To provide a monetary comparison: The original budget of SR 70 was 3.4 million DM over
four years, against 7.1 million DM for the first three years of the DRS; RS I 2, “Betr.: Studie
SR 70,” 22.8.1978, BArch B 106/66930.
86. Ergebnisbericht 2. Sitzung Projektbeirat Risiko, 18.09.1978, B 106/89178. In fact, the initial
title of the study was “Kerntechnische Risiken und ihre Perzeption” (“nuclear risks and their
perception”).
87. The project, which ran from 1974 to 1980, produced a total of 17 studies on subjects ranging
from a “comparison of health risks attached to different forms of electricity production” and
“the nuclear controversy reflected by daily journals,” to an analysis of political decision-
making processes in the context of the German fast breeder program. For an overview cf.
Conrad and Krebsbach-Gnath, Technologische Risiken und gesellschaftliche Konflikte, vol. 2,
25–49.
88. Risikoperzeption und Akzeptanzverhalten. Stellungnahme zu den Anmerkungen des
Soziologen-Teams der Universität München, 2, BArch B 106/66930.
89. Cf. Conrad and Krebsbach-Gnath, Technologische Risiken und gesellschaftliche Konflikte,
vol. 2, 50–66.
90. Sahl, 27.2.1975, BArch B 106/52530.
91. For a reprint and analysis of the image see Schüring, “Advertising the Nuclear Venture,”
383–4.
92. Cf. Wehner, Die Versicherung der Atomgefahr, 253–72.
93. Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 94, writes of “some 100,000 photoco-
pies” being circulated. This should not have come as a surprise, since a very similar dynamic
had already occurred with the estimates of accident consequences contained in the USAEC
WASH-750 study, published in 1957.
94. “Ein furchterregendes Unterfangen.” DER SPIEGEL, 1975 (30), 38.
95. Hauff, Expertengespräch Reaktorsicherheitsforschung, 87–8.
96. Albers, Gerichtsentscheidungen zu Kernkraftwerken.

97. Rusinek, “Wyhl”; see also Augustine, Taking on Technocracy, Ch. 4.
98. Müller, “BASF – eine neue Dimension der Reaktorsicherheit?” 285. Even before the Wyhl
case, officials were aware that some parts of the probabilistic approach were highly proble-
matic in legal as well as public relations terms. For instance, a meeting of the “Arbeitskreis
Risiko” of the BMI in 1975 cautioned that a “site-specific appraisal of risks” had to be
handled with care in public, since there was a “tendency to demand the same low risk for
every point in the FRG”; Besprechungsbericht 3. AK Risiko, 26.2.1975, BArch B 106/52530.
99. Wyhl-Urteil, 57. For legal details cf. Albers, Gerichtsentscheidungen zu Kernkraftwerken,
115–35.
100. Kurzprotokoll Gespräch über die Konsequenzen aus dem Urteil des Verwaltungsgerichts
Freiburg in Sachen Wyhl, 17 March 1977, p.2f., UASt 200/2096.
101. Thus Smidt, ibid., 3. For a more detailed analysis cf. the contribution of Lukes to
“Kernenergie und Risiko,” 1. GRS-Fachgespräch, 3./4.11.1977, UASt 200/1560.
102. Stellungnahme der RSK zum Urteil des Verwaltungsgerichts Freiburg, Ergebnisprotokoll
Reaktor-Sicherheitskommission, 122. Sitzung, 16.3.1977, pp. 6f., BArch B 106/75321; cf.
Aussage von Herrn Prof. Kußmaul [. . .] vor dem Verwaltungsgericht Würzburg, UAST 200/
2129.
103. Cf. Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 113–6.; cf. Albers,
Gerichtsentscheidungen zu Kernkraftwerken, 131–45. The Wyhl decision itself was reversed
by the administrative court of the Land Baden-Würtemberg in 1982. After the Federal
Administrative Court upheld this decision in a final revision in 1985, the reactor could
legally have been built. However, the energy companies had lost interest in the project at that
point.
104. On the impact of the TMI accident in Europe cf. Bösch, “Taming Nuclear Power.”
105. Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS), Deutsche Risikostudie Kernkraftwerke, 241.
106. “argumente” (KWU), 22.8.1979, 2–3, UASt 200/1560.
107. Braun, Probabilistische Risikoanalyse, 383. However, in his estimate, the “positive aspects” of
the study had “nearly no effect at all either,” ibid.
108. DER SPIEGEL, “Still verdunsten.”
109. Projektbeirat SR 70, 5. Sitzung (28.11.80), BArch B 106/89178.
110. Verein für Umwelt- und Arbeitsschutz, “Stellungnahme zur ‘Deutschen Risikostudie’ der
Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit,” 23.
111. Kafka, Zur Deutschen Risikostudie, 22.1.1980, BArch B 106/66725.
112. Öko-Institut, Risikountersuchungen zu Leichtwasserreaktoren.
113. Altenburg, Kernenergie und Politikberatung, 134–60.
114. Birkhofer and others tried to resist this division of labor, which they (correctly) understood
to be a vote of non-confidence regarding their independence as scientists: ibid., 40; and
Radkau, “Angstabwehr,” 45–6. Cf. also Benecke, “Die kompromittierte Wissenschaft”; and
Birkhofer, “Die kompromittierte Wissenschaft?”.
115. Although construction of the SNR 300 was completed by 1986, the license for nuclear
operation was withheld due to the resistance of the regional government. The reactor was
ultimately decommissioned without ever becoming critical in 1991; cf. Overbeck, Der
Schnelle Brüter in Kalkar.
116. Braun, Probabilistische Risikoanalyse, 11.
117. Ibid.
118. DER SPIEGEL, “‘Die Sache hat uns kalt erwischt’,” 27. Cf. Michel and Spengler, GAU.
119. Radkau, “Angstabwehr.”
120. Woldeck, “Warnung vor der Wahrscheinlichkeit.”
121. Deutscher Bundestag, “Umweltgutachten 1987,” 524–7.
122. Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 166.
123. Rambusch and Meyer, “Kernkraftwerke als technisch-physikalische Systeme”; cf. Bertram
Köhler, “Schwerpunkte der Entwicklung im Kraftwerksanlagenbau der DDR,” 149.
124. Institutional centers of nuclear safety research included the chair for reactor technology at the
TU Dresden, the engineering college in Zittau (IHZ), founded in 1969 with a special focus on
power stations and energy conversation, and the Institute for Nuclear Research at Rossendorf;
cf. Meyer, “Kernenergetische Ausbildung und Forschung an der TUD und der IHZ,” 393–6.
125. Cf. Graupe, “Untersuchung der Zuverlässigkeit eines automatischen Systems im
Kernkraftwerk Rheinsberg und Abschätzung seines Instandhaltungszyklus unter
Berücksichtigung der Versorgungssicherheit des Verbundnetzes”; Adam et al., “Aufgaben
des Physikers bei der Beherrschung von Kernreaktoren für Energieerzeugungszwecke”; and
Kubis and Uhlmann, “Methoden der Sicherheitsbeurteilung von Kernkraftwerken.”
126. On “Havarie” as the East German term for “industrial accident” or “hazardous incident” and
its semantics see Lindenberger, “‘Havarie’,” 306–11.
127. ORGREB-Institut: Gewährleistung der nuklearen Sicherheit von DWR-KKW. Ökonom.-
technische Bewertung von Maßnahmen zur Gewährleistung der nuklearen Sicherheit, Febr.
1977 – Mai 1978, BArch DF 10/1154.
128. Cf. BArch DF 10/640.
129. Köhler, “Schwerpunkte der Entwicklung im Kraftwerksanlagenbau der DDR,” 150–1.
130. Adam, “Tendenzen in der Energetik und Sicherheit des Kernkraftwerks”; and Adam et al.,
“Die Sicherheit des Kernkraftwerks.”
131. The introduction to the special issue was written by the department head of reactor physics at
the Center for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, an institution of the GDR Academy of Science.
Brinckmann, “Zuverlässigkeit und Verfügbarkeit von Anlagen – Zur Einführung,” 57.
132. F. Wolfgang Krüger: Kritik des Rasmussen-Berichts (WASH-1400) über die Störfallrisiken
von kommerziellen Kernkraftwerken in den USA (SAAS 199), 26, BArch DF 10/672.
133. Schreiben Sitzlack an Mittag 15.2.1980, fol. 18–25, BArch DY 3023/1034.
134. Krüger, “Das Strahlenrisiko und seine Bewertung für Kernanlagen,” 98, 97. The strong
ideological emphasis of the paper could partly be due Krüger’s personal circumstances, as he
defended his habilitation the same year. In such a situation, a clear political commitment
was expected from all scientists. Krüger partially reversed his opinion later and was actually
one of the first experts to call for probabilistic research in the GDR as a means to detect weak
points in reactor design in 1981, while still insisting that a deterministic understanding of
safety remained the only possible basis for all regulatory matters; cf. F.W. Krüger: Die
nukleare Sicherheit von Kernanlagen (SAAS 277), 1981, BArch DF 10/672.
135. Fuchs, “Über die Zuverlässigkeit von Kernkraftwerken,” 73.
136. Ibid.
137. Akte 42, Protokoll 49. Beratung WREG, 26. Sept. 1986, f. 7, BBAW, FOB Geo- und
Kosmoswissenschaften.
138. See Vorlage: Beschluss zur Verbesserung der operativen Wirksamkeit des SAAS vom
17.9.1986 BArch DF 10/1309, requesting more resources and more for the staff. 14 of the
24 new positions were to be filled by university graduates for tasks in the field of reactor
safety at the institute of nuclear facility control at the SAAS.
139. Mertins: Schaffung von Grundlagen zur Risikobewertung des WWER-440 (W213), BArch
DF 10/633.
140. The IAEA efforts to promote risk research beyond the West preceded the Tschernobyl
catastrophy, but were intensified afterwards; cf. J. Höhn, J. Rumpf, Probabilistic Methods for
Safety Decisions in the Regulatory Process, Statement to be presented at the IAEA workshop
“Advances in the Reliability Analysis and Probabilistic Safety Assessment,” Budapest 7.–11.10.
1985, BArch DF 10/633; and; SAAS Leitungsinformation: Auswertung der Erkenntnisse und
Ergebnisse des 2. Workshops “Advances in Reliability Analysis (RA) and Probabilistic Safety
Assessment (PSA)” von 6.9.1987 bis 12.9.1987 in Seregelyes/UVR, BArch DF 10/633.
141. The bilateral agreement on scientific cooperation between the FRG and the GDR from 1987
contained a project on reactor safety, but did not tackle probabilistic risk analysis explicitly;
cf. Siegwart Collatz, Dietrich Falkenberg, Peter Liewers, Forschungs- und
Entwicklungsarbeiten des ZfK Rossendorf zur Kernenergienutzung, in: Liewers/Abele/
Barkleit 2000, 416. In 1988, at the request of the USSR, the GDR became party to an
agreement between the FRG and the USSR on safety-relevant computation of nuclear power
plants. The contract parties agreed on cooperation in deterministic and probabilistic safety
analysis ; see– Einbeziehung DDR in Zusammenarbeit UdSSR und BRD auf Gebiet der
nuklearen Sicherheit, BArch DC 20/13198.
142. SAAS Leitungsinformation: Auswertung der Erkenntnisse und Ergebnisse des 2.
Workshops “Advances in Reliability Analysis (RA) and Probabilistic Safety Assessment
(PSA)” vom 6.9.1987 bis 12.9.1987 in Seregelyes/UVR, BArch DF 10/633. A full PRA the
GDR’s power plants was never carried out. Although Federal authorities commissioned
a number of safety studies after 1990, they were almost entirely limited to deterministic
methods. While additional probabilistic studies were generally recommended, the facilities
were decommissed before this could be put into practice; cf. Kohler, Bestandsaufnahme und
Perspektiven der Atom. und Energiewirtschaft der DDR; Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit
(GRS), Sicherheitsbeurteilung des Kernkraftwerks Greifswald, Block 1–4; GRS,
Sicherheitsbeurteilung des Kernkraftwerks Greifswald, Block 5; GRS, Sicherheitstechnische
Bewertung des Kernkraftwerkes Stendal, Block A, vom Typ WWER-1000. GRS–99. 1993.
While additional probabilistic studies were generally recommended, the plants were closed
before this could be put into practice.
143. Abele, Kernkraft in der DDR, 100–5. For a contextualized and reflected report of
a participant in anti-nuclear voices and groups within the GDR opposition see Neubert,
Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR, 626–9. An analysis of the knowledge base of the GDR
opposition to nuclear energy can be found in Augustine, Taking on Technocracy, chapter 7.
144. According to the eyewitness Neubert, the meeting lead nowhere, since Fuchs denied any
safety problem with nuclear power in the GDR; Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der
DDR, 628–9.
145. Akte 42, Protokoll 49. Beratung WREG, 26. Sept. 1986. f. 2–3, BBAW, FOB Geo- und
Kosmoswissenschaften.
146. Wolf, Störfall, 111.
147. Spectrum was a science journal, published by the Academy of Science of the GDR in order to
introduce a general public to new research and findings done at the academy. The debate on
“Störfall” started in the April issue of spectrum in 1988 and lasted till the May issue of
the year 1989. Christa Wolf wrote a final statement that appeared in the October issue, very
shortly before the Wall came down.
148. Hörz, “Risiko und Verantwortung,” 873–84. His ideas were based on his own previous work
on probability and chance, cf. Hörz, Zufall, 228. On Hörz’s biography, see Baumgartner and
Helbig, Biographisches Handbuch, 341–2.
149. One of them took place in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Another arena for discuss-
ing risk in socialism provided a colloquium at the Verkehrshochschule Dresden. The con-
tributions were published in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Verkehrswesen
“Friedrich List,” Sonderheft 52: Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium “Risiko in Ingenieurtätigkeit
und Technik – weltanschaulich-philosophische Probleme,” February 2–3, 1989.
150. Bauer, “Risiko und bewusste Gesellschaftsentwicklung,” 74.
151. A manuscript written by Hörz and the legal scholar Dietmar Seidel was rejected by the
publishing house Dietz in early 1990; see Buchmanuskript Risiko und Entscheidung, BArch
Berlin, DY 30/21517.
152. Cf. Downer, “Disowning Fukushima”; Downer, “The Unknowable Ceilings of Safety”; and
Clarke, Worst Cases.
153. IAEA. Probabilistic Safety Assessment; cf. also IAEA, Safety Assessment for Facilities and
Activities.
154. For a contextualization of Merkel’s decision within the history of nuclear power in Germany
cf. Uekötter, “Fukushima and the Lessons of History.”
155. An official transcript of the speech can be found online at: https://www.bundesregierung.de/
ContentArchiv/DE/Archiv17/Regierungserklaerung/2011/2011-06-09-merkel-energie-
zukunft.html (accessed April 17, 2018).
156. Hacking, “Statistical Language, Statistical Truth and Statistical Reasoning.”
157. Morgan, The World in a Model, esp. 400–409; on the performativy of economic models also
MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera; Mackensie, Muniesa and Siu (eds.), Do Economists
Make Markets? We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for attracting our attention
to this literature.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was made possible by support from the German Research Foundation/
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), in the framework of the DFG Research Group 2448
‘Practicing Evidence – Evidencing Practice’. We would like to thank the members of the Research
Group for many fruitful discussions and suggestions, which helped to sharpen our own thinking
on evidence, risk and safety. We are especially indebted to Sarah Blacker for conceptual discussions
and help with English editing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [FG 2448].
Bibliography
Archival Material
Bundesarchiv (BArch): Files Bundesministerium für Bildung und Wissenschaft (B 138);
Bundesministerium des Inneren (B 106); Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie
(B 196); Files Staatliches Amt für Atomsicherheit und Strahlenschutz (DF 10); Sozialistische
Einheitspartei Deutschlands (DY 30).
Stuttgart University Archives, (UASt): Files on Reactor Safety Research, Materialprüfungsanstalt
(200 Series).
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBA): FOB Geo- und Kosmoswissenschaften.
Archives of the Deutsches Museum (DMA): Maier-Leibnitz Papers (NL 111).
Published Sources and Secondary Literature

“‘Die Sache hat uns kalt erwischt’.” DER SPIEGEL, May 12, 1986/20.
“‘Ein furchterregendes Unterfangen’.’ DER SPIEGEL, July 21, 1975/30.
Abele, J. Kernkraft in der DDR: Zwischen nationaler Industriepolitik und sozialistischer
Zusammenarbeit, 1963–1990. Berichte und Studien Nr. 26. Dresden: Hannah-Arendt-Institut
für Totalitarismusforschung, 2000.
Abele, J., P. Liewers, and G. Barkleit, eds. Zur Geschichte der Kernenergie in der DDR. Frankfurt am
Main, New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Adam, E., S. Collatz, D. Falkenberg, G. Flach, K. Fuchs, R. Kästner, P. Liewers, R. Rockstroh, and L.
Wetzel. “Aufgaben des Physikers bei der Beherrschung von Kernreaktoren für
Energieerzeugungszwecke.” Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 13, no. 10
(1970): 310–316.
Adam, E. “Tendenzen in der Energetik und Sicherheit des Kernkraftwerks.” Kernenergie.
Zeitschrift für Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 21, no. 1 (1978): 1–7.
Adam, E., H. Carl, M. Heitsch, A. Lehmann, R. Müller, and R. Schwarz. “Die Sicherheit des
Kernkraftwerks: Ein Anliegen der theoretischen und experimentellen Unfallanalyse und wesen-
tliches Kriterium für die Auslegung der Gesamtanlage.” Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für
Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 21, no. 9 (1978): 275–278.
Albers, H. Gerichtsentscheidungen zu Kernkraftwerken. Argumente in der Energiediskussion Bd.
10. Villingen-Schwenningen: Neckar-Verlag, 1980.
Albrecht, L., and W. Schimmel. “Genehmigungsverfahren für Kernanlagen.” Kernenergie.
Altenburg, C. Kernenergie und Politikberatung: Die Vermessung einer Kontroverse. 1. Aufl ed.
Wiesbaden: VS Verl. für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010.
Augustine, D. L. Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. Protest,
culture and society volume 24. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Balogh, B. Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial
Nuclear Power 1945–1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Bauer, A. “Risiko und bewusste Gesellschaftsentwicklung.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der
Hochschule für Verkehrswesen „Friedrich List“ 52 (1989): 72–74.
Baumgartner, G., and D. Helbig, ed. Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ/DDR 1945 – 1990. 2 vols.,
München: Saur, 1996–97.
Beck, U. Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1986.
Benecke, J. “Die kompromittierte Wissenschaft: Erfahrungen bei der Risikoanalyse.” In
AUSgebrütet - Argumente zur Brutreaktorpolitik, edited by K. M. Meyer-Abich and
R. Ueberhorst, 259–279. Policy-Forschung 1. Basel, s.l.: Birkhäuser Basel, 1985.
Birkhofer, A. “Die kompromittierte Wissenschaft? Eine Entgegnung.” In AUSgebrütet –
Argumente zur Brutreaktorpolitik, edited by K. M. Meyer-Abich and R. Ueberhorst, 280–288.
Basel: Birkhäuser, 1985.
Birkhofer, A., and F. W. Heuser. “Zielsetzung und Stand der deutschen Risikostudie.”
Atomwirtschaft– Atomtechnik 22, no. 6 (1977): 331–338.
Birkhofer, A., W. Braun, E. H. Koch, O. Kellermann, K.-H. Lindackers, and D. Smidt.
“Reaktorsicherheit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” Atomwirtschaft – Atomtechnik 15,
no. 9/10 (1970): 441–448.
Blacker, S. “Tactical Translation: Data as the Strategic Attenuation of Indigenous Traditional
Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. (forthcoming).
Blacker, S. Warding off Disease: On the Development of Precision Medicine in Canada. (book
manuscript in progress).
Bösch, F. “Taming Nuclear Power: The Accident near Harrisburg and the Change in West
German and International Nuclear Policy in the 1970s and Early 1980s.” German History 35,
no. 1 (2017): 71–95.
Boudia, S. “‘Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks.’ In Risk and ‘Risk
Society’ in Historical Perspective, Ed. Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas.” Special Issue, History and
Technology 23, no. 4 (2007): 389–406.
Boudia, S. “Managing Scientific and Political Uncertainty: Environmental Risk Assessment in
a Historical Perspective.” In Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World, edited
by S. Boudia and N. Jas, 95–114. New York: Berghahn, 2014.
Boudia, S., and N. Jas, eds “Risk and “Risk Society” in Historical Perspective.” Special Issue, History
and Technology 23, no. 4 (2007): 317–420.
Boudia, S., and N. Jas. Gouverner un monde toxique. Versailles: Éditions Quae, 2019.
Bouk, D. How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Braun, W., ed. Probabilistische Risikoanalyse: 3. GfS-Seminar, 23./24. Juni 1983, Offenbach.
Wuppertal: Gesellschaft für Sicherheitswissenschaft (GfS), 1984.
Brinckmann, H. F. “Zuverlässigkeit und Verfügbarkeit von Anlagen – Zur Einführung.”
Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 27, no. 2 (1984): 57.
Carlisle, R. P. “Probabilistic Risk Assessment in Nuclear Reactors: Engineering Success, Public

Relations Failure.” Technology and Culture 38, no. 4 (1997): 920–941.
Carson, C. Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere. Publications of the German
Historical Institute. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010.
Cartwright, N. “Well-Ordered Science: Evidence for Use.” Philosophy of Science 73, no. 5 (2006):
981–990.
Case, E. G. “Principles and Practices in Reviewing Hazards Summary Reports.” In Reactor Safety
and Hazard Evaluation Techniques: Proceedings of the Symposium sponsored by the IAEA and
held in Vienna, 14–18 May 1962, ed. International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA). 2 vols.,
453–642. Vienna: IAEA, 1962.
Chandler, J., A. I. Davidson, and H. D. Harootunian, eds. Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice,
and Persuasion across the Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Clarke, L. B. Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006.
Conrad, J., and C. Krebsbach-Gnath. Technologische Risiken und gesellschaftliche Konflikte:
Politische Risikostrategien im Bereich der Kernenergie. Bericht für das Bundesministerium des
Inneren. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Batelle-Institut, 1980.
Conze, E. Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis
in die Gegenwart. München: Siedler, 2009.
Conze, W. “Sicherheit, Schutz.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-
sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck, 831–862.
Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984.
Covello, V. T., and J. Mumpower. “Risk Analysis and Risk Management: An Historical
Perspective.” Risk Analysis 5, no. 2 (1985): 103–120.
Daase, C. “Die Historisierung der Sicherheit: Anmerkungen zur historischen Sicherheitsforschung
aus politikwissenschaftlicher Sicht.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 3 (2012): 387–405.
Dahl, P. F. Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy. Bristol, Philadelphia: Institute
of Physics, 1999.
Deringer, W. Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2018.
Desrosières, A. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011.
Deutscher Bundestag. Umweltgutachten 1987. Bundestag Drucksache 11/1568, 21.12.1987.
Dooley, J., B. Hansson, J. X. Kasperson, R. E. Kasperson, T. O’Riordan, and H. Paschen. The
Emergence of Risk Analysis on the International Scene'. In Nuclear Risk Analysis in
Comparative Perspective: The Impacts of Large-Scale Risk Assessment in Five Countries. ed.
Roger E. Kasperson and Jeanne X. Kasperson, 1–26. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987.
Downer, J. “Disowning Fukushima: Managing the Credibility of Nuclear Reliability Assessment in
the Wake of Disaster.” Regulation & Governance 39, no. 6 (2013): 287–309.
Downer, J. “The Unknowable Ceilings of Safety: Three Ways that Nuclear Accidents Escape the
Calculus of Risk Assessments.” In The Ethics of Nuclear Energy: Risk, Justice, and Democracy in
the Post-Fukushima Era, edited by B. Taebi and S. Roeser, 35–52. Cambridge: Cambridge
Engels, J. I. Naturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik: Ideenwelt und politische Verhaltensstile in
Naturschutz und Umweltbewegung, 1950–1980. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006.
Ethik-Kommission Sichere Energieversorgung. “Deutschlands Energiewende: Ein
Gemeinschaftswerk für die Zukunft.” https://www.bundesregierung.de/ContentArchiv/DE/
Archiv17/Artikel/2011/05/2011-05-30-bericht-ethikkommission.html.
Farmer, F. R. “Siting Criteria: A New Approach.” In Containment and Siting of Nuclear Power
Plants: Proceedings of a Symposium on the Containment and Siting of Nuclear Power Plants, Held
by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, 3–7 April 1967. ed. International Atomic
Energy Agency, 303–329. Vienna: IAEA, 1967.
Foasso, C. Atomes sous surveillance: Une histoire de la sûreté nucléaire en France. Bruxelles:
P. Lang, 2012.
Franzen, L. F. “Zum Genehmigungsverfahren für Kernkraftwerke.” Technische Überwachung 13,

no. 4 (1972): 93–100.
Frevert, U., ed. Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003.
Fuchs, K. “Über die Zuverlässigkeit von Kernkraftwerken.” Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für
Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 27, no. 2 (1984): 69–74.
Garrick, B. J., and R. Christie. “Probabilistic Risk Assessment Practice in the USA for Nuclear
Power Plants.” Safety Science 40 (2002): 177–201.
Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS). Deutsche Risikostudie Kernkraftwerke, Phase B: Eine
Untersuchung im Auftrag des Bundesministers für Forschung und Technologie. Köln: TÜV
Rheinland, 1990.
Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS). Sicherheitsbeurteilung des Kernkraftwerks Greifswald,
Block 1–4: Eine Dokumentation der bisherigen Untersuchungen der Gesellschaft für
Reaktorsicherheit(GRS) mbH und des Staatlichen Amtes für Atomsicherheit und Strahlenschutz
(SAAS). GRS Berichte 77. Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS), 1990.
Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS). Sicherheitsbeurteilung des Kernkraftwerks Greifswald,
Block 5 (WWER 440 W 213): Gemeinsamer deutsch-sowjetischer Bericht = Ocenka bezopasnoti
atomnoj elektrostancii Grajfsval”d, 5 bloka (VVĖR 440 V 213). GRS-Bericht 88. 1992.
Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit (GRS). Sicherheitstechnische Bewertung des Kernkraftwerkes
Stendal, Block A, vom Typ WWER-1000. GRS–99. 1993.
Gieseler, H. “Eine Methode zur Berechnung der Zuverlässigkeit von Reaktor-Sicherheitssystemen.
” Berichte des Instituts für Mess- und Regelungstechnik, Technische Hochschule München
(MRR) 31, December 1966.
Goumri, M. “Making the Accident Hypothetical: How Can One Deal with the Potential Nuclear
Disaster? In Living in a Nuclear World, from Fukushima to Hiroshima, edited by B. Bensaude-
Vincent, S. Boudia, and K. Sato. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming.
Graupe, H. “Untersuchung der Zuverlässigkeit eines automatischen Systems im Kernkraftwerk
Rheinsberg und Abschätzung seines Instandhaltungszyklus unter Berücksichtigung der
Versorgungssicherheit des Verbundnetzes.” Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für Kernforschung und
Kerntechnik 13, no. 9 (1970): 279–283.
Hacking, I. “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.” Humanities in Society 5 (1982):
279–295.
Hacking, I. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Hacking, I. “Statistical Language, Statistical Truth and Statistical Reasoning. The Self-
Authentification of a Style of Scientific Reasoning.” In The Social Dimensions of Science, edited
by M. Ernan, 130–157. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.
Hasenöhrl, U. Zivilgesellschaft und Protest: Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung
in Bayern 1945–1980. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011.
Hauff, V., ed. Expertengespräch Reaktorsicherheitsforschung: Protokoll des Expertengesprächs vom
31.8. bis 1.9. 1978 im BMFT. Villingen: Neckar-Verlag, 1980. Argumente in der
Energiediskussion, Bd. 8.
Hecht, G. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. Inside
technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Heintz, B. “Numerische Differenz: Überlegungen zu einer Soziologie des (quantitativen)
Vergleichs.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 39, no. 3 (2010): 162–181.
Hinton, C. “British Developments in Atomic Energy.” Nucleonics 12, no. 1 (1954): 6–10.
Hörz, H. Zufall – Eine philosophische Untersuchung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1980.
Hörz, H. “Risiko und Verantwortung.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 36, no. 10 (1988):
873–884.
Hosemann, G., and R. Werner, eds. Risiko: Schnittstelle zwischen Recht und Technik. VDE-
Studienreihe 2. Berlin: VDE-Verlag, 1982. Vorträge der VDE/VDI-Tagung vom 18.-19. Mai
1982 in Seeheim.
Hunnius, G., and J. Kliemt. “Risiko als soziale Konstruktion: Risikoperzeption und -
kommunikation im Systemvergleich BRD-DDR.” In Das Risiko ist ein Konstrukt:
Wahrnehmungen zur Risikowahrnehmung, edited by B. Rück and U. Becker, 245–259.

München: Knesebeck, 1993.
International Atomic Energy Agency, ed. 1962. Reactor Safety and Hazard Evaluation Techniques:
Proceedings of the Symposium sponsored by the IAEA and held in Vienna, 14–18 May 1962. 2
vols. 2. Vienna: IAEA.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Probabilistic Safety assessment: A Report by the
International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group. INSAG-6. Safety series Safety reports 75, 6.
Vienna: Internat. Atomic Energy Agency, 1992.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Safety Assessment for Facilities and Activities:
General Safety Requirements. IAEA Safety Standards Series General Safety Requirements no.
GSR Part 4 (Rev. 1). Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2016.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ed. 1967. Containment and Siting of Nuclear Power
Plants: Proceedings of a Symposium on the Containment and Siting of Nuclear Power Plants, Held
by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, 3–7 April 1967. Vienna: IAEA.
Jarausch, K. H. Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-cultural History of the GDR. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004.
Kahlert, J. Die Kernenergiepolitik in der DDR: Zur Geschichte uneingeloster Fortschrittshoffnungen.
Koln: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1988.
Kasperson, R. E., and J. X. Kasperson, eds. Nuclear Risk Analysis in Comparative Perspective: The
Impacts of Large-scale Risk Assessment in Five Countries. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987.
Keller, W., and M. Modarres. “A Historical Overview of Probabilistic Risk Assessment
Development and Its Use in the Nuclear Power Industry: A Tribute to the Late Professor
Norman Carl Rasmussen.” Reliability Engineering & System Safety 89, no. 3 (2005): 271–285.
Kellermann, O. “Accident Analysis as the Basis of Technical Examination for the Safety of Nuclear
Reactor Power Plants.” In Reactor Safety and Hazard Evaluation Techniques: Proceedings of the
Symposium sponsored by the IAEA and held in Vienna, 14–18 May 1962, ed. International
Atomic Energy Agency. 2 vols., 483–492. Vienna: IAEA, 1962.
Kelly, T. “Evidence.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. Stanford:
Stanford University Metaphysics Lab 2016. https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/
archinfo.cgi?entry=evidence/archives/win2016/entries/evidence/
Kersten, J., S. Temple, F. Uekötter, and M. Vogt. Europe after Fukushima: German Perspectives on
the Future of Nuclear Power. RCC Perspectives. Munich: Rachel Carson Center, 2012.
Kirchhof, A. M., and J.-H. Meyer. “Global Protest against Nuclear Power: Transfer and
Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s.” Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014):
165–190.
Kleßmann, C. “Konturen einer integrierten Nachkriegsgeschichte.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte
55, no. 18–19 (2005): 3–11.
Köhler, B. “Schwerpunkte der Entwicklung im Kraftwerksanlagenbau der DDR.” In Zur Geschichte
der Kernenergie in der DDR, edited by J. Abele, P. Liewers, and G. Barkleit, 115–162. Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 2000.
Kohler, S. Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven der Atom. und Energiewirtschaft der DDR: Erstellt
durch das Öko-Institut Freiburg/Darmstadt. Freiburg: Öko-Institut, 1990.
Krause, H. D., ed. 10 Jahre Laboratorium für Reaktorregelung und Anlagensicherung (LRA).
München: LRA, 1974.
Krohn, W., and P. Weingart. “’Tschernobyl’: Das größte anzunehmende Experiment.” In GAU:
Die Havarie der Expertenkultur, edited by K. M. Michel and T. Spengler, 1–25. Berlin: Rotbuch
Verlag, 1986.
Krüger, F. W. “Das Strahlenrisiko und seine Bewertung für Kernanlagen.” Kernenergie. Zeitschrift
für Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 22, no. 3 (1979): 94–98.
Krüger, L., L. J. Daston, and M. Heidelberger. The Probabilistic Revolution: Ideas in History.
Bradford books 1. Cambridge, London: The Massachussets Institute of Technology Press, 1987.
Kubis, K., and G. Uhlmann. “Methoden der Sicherheitsbeurteilung von Kernkraftwerken.”
Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für Kernforschung und Kerntechnik 15, no. 1 (1972): 1–4.
Kuhlmann, A., ed. 1. Weltkongress für Sicherheitswissenschaft: Leben in Sicherheit: Tagungsbericht.

Vol. 2. Köln: TÜV Rheinland, 1990.
Kuhlmann, A. “Was muß die Sicherheitswissenschaft leisten? Zur Einführung in den 1.
Weltkongreß für Sicherheitswissenschaft.” In 1. Weltkongress für Sicherheitswissenschaft:
Leben in Sicherheit: Tagungsbericht, edited by A. Kuhlmann, 23–42. Vol. 2. Köln: TÜV
Rheinland, 1990.
Kupper, P. “Expertise und Risiko, Vertrauen und Macht: Gesellschaftliche Ursachen und Folgen
erodierender Autorität von Kernenergieexperten in den 1970er Jahren.” Schweizerische
Zeitschrift für Geschichte 55 (2005): 60–69.
Laufs, P. Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke: Die Entwicklung im politischen und tech-
nischen Umfeld der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Berlin: Springer Vieweg, 2013.
Laurence, G. C. “Operating Nuclear Reactors Safely.” In Reactor Safety and Hazard Evaluation
Techniques: Proceedings of the Symposium sponsored by the IAEA and held in Vienna,
14–18 May 1962. ed. International Atomic Energy Agency. 2 vols., 135–46 2. Vienna: IAEA,
1962.
Lindackers, K. H. “Risiken in der Kerntechnik.” In Risiko: Schnittstelle zwischen Recht und Technik,
edited by G. Hosemann and R. Werner, 87–101. Berlin: VDE-Verlag, 1982.
Lindenberger, T. “’Havarie’: Reading East-German Society through the Violenc/se of Things.”
Divinatio 42/43 (2015): 301–369.
Luntz, J. “How Safe Is Safe?” Nucleonics 11, no. 3 (1953): 9.
MacKenzie, D. A. An Engine, Not a Camera. How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2008.
MacKenzie, D. A., F. Muniesa, and L. Siu, eds. Do Economists Make Markets? On the
Performativity of Economics. Third printing, and first paperback printing. Princeton, NJ,
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Merz, L. “Philosophie des Reaktorschutzes: Deterministische und probabilistische Thesen zur
Reaktorsicherheit.” Atomwirtschaft - Atomtechnik 15, no. 3 (1970): 118–126.
Meyer, K. “Kernenergetische Ausbildung und Forschung an der TUD und IHZ.” In Zur Geschichte
der Kernenergie in der DDR, edited by J. Abele, P. Liewers, and G. Barkleit. Frankfurt am Main,
New York: Peter Lang, 2000: 387–409.
Meyer-Abich, K. M., and R. Ueberhorst, eds. AUSgebrütet - Argumente zur Brutreaktorpolitik.
Policy-Forschung 1. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1985.
Michel, K. M., and T. Spengler, eds. GAU: Die Havarie der Expertenkultur. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag,
1986.
Milder, S. Greening Democracy: The Anti-nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in
West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Mittelstraß, J., ed. Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie: Band 1. Stuttgart and
Weimar:J.B. Metzler, 2005.
Mittelstraß, J. “Evidenz.” In Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie: Band 1, edited by
J. Mittelstraß, 609–610. Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2005.
Morgan, M. S. The World in the Model. How Economists Work and Think. Cambridge: Cambridge
Müller, W. D. “BASF – eine neue Dimension der Reaktorsicherheit?” Atomwirtschaft -
Atomtechnik 21, no. 6 (1976): 285.
Müller, W. D. Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Anfänge und
Weichenstellungen. Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vol. 1.
Stuttgart: Schäffer, 1990.
Müller, W. D. Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Auf der Suche nach
dem Erfolg: Die sechziger Jahre. Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
vol. 2. Stuttgart: Schäffer, 1996.
Müller, W. D. Geschichte der Kernenergie in der DDR: Kernforschung und Kerntechnik im Schatten
des Sozialismus. Geschichte der Kernenergie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland/ vol. 3.
Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel, 2001.
Neubert, E. Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR: 1949–1989. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische
Bildung, 2000.
“Nuclear Hazards Predictable, Says Teller: Great Need for Public to be Educated.” Nucleonics 11,
no. 11 (1953): 80.
Nye, M. J., ed. The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences: The Cambridge History of Science,
Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Öko-Institut. Risikountersuchungen zu Leichtwasserreaktoren: Analytische Weiterentwicklung zur
“Deutschen Risikostudie Kernkraftwerke.” 3 vols. Freiburg i. Br.: Öko-Inst, 1983.
Okrent, D. Nuclear Reactor Safety: On the History of the Regulatory Process. Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.
Overbeck, H. Der Schnelle Brüter in Kalkar: Planung, Bau, vornukleare Inbetriebnahme, Stillegung.
Düsseldorf: VDI-Verlag, 1992.
Parthasarathy, S., J. E. Saul, and J. M. Wetmore, eds. “Reconstructing Order through Rhetorics of
Risk.” Special Issue, Science, Technology, & Human Values 29, no. 3 (2004): 267–427.
Patriarca, S. Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-century Italy. Cambridge
Studies in Italian History and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Perkins, J. H. “Development of Risk Assessment for Nuclear Power: Insights from History.”
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 4, no. 4 (2014): 273–287.
Perrow, C. Normal Accidents: Living with High-risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Petroski, H. To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. London: Macmillan,
1985.
Petroski, H. To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
Pietruska, J. L. Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Porter, T. M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking. 1820 – 1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986.
Porter, T. M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. 2nd ed.
Princeton: Princenton University Press, 1996.
Radkau, J. Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975: Verdrängte Alternativen in
der Kerntechnik und der Ursprung der nuklearen Kontroverse. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1983.
Radkau, J. “Angstabwehr: Auch eine Geschichte der Atomtechnik.” In GAU: Die Havarie der
Expertenkultur, edited by K. M. Michel and T. Spengler, 27–53. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1986.
Radkau, J. Technik in Deutschland: Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute. Umfassend überarb. und
aktualisierte Neuausg. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008.
Radkau, J. “Der ‘Größte Anzunehmende Unfall’.” In Ökologische Erinnerungsorte, edited by
F. Uekötter, 50–60. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014.
Radkau, J. The Age of Ecology: A Global History. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
Rambusch, K., and K. Meyer. “Kernkraftwerke als technisch-physikalische Systeme.” Kernenergie.
Randers, G. “For a Planned Society – and Why Not?” Nucleonics 17, no. 2 (1959): 69.
Reichert, M. Kernenergiewirtschaft in der DDR: Entwicklungsbedingungen, konzeptioneller
Anspruch und Realisierungsgrad, 1955–1990. Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
Bd. 19. St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae, 1999.
Rip, A. “The Mutual Dependence of Risk Research and Political Context.” Science & Technology
Studies 4, no. 3/4 (1986): 3–15.
Rück, B., ed. Gesellschaft und Unsicherheit. Karlsruhe: VVW, 1987.
Rück, B., and U. Becker, eds. Das Risiko ist ein Konstrukt: Wahrnehmungen zur
Risikowahrnehmung. München: Knesebeck, 1993.
Rusinek, B.-A. “Wyhl.” In Deutsche Erinnerungsorte II, edited by É. François and H. Schulze,
652–666. Beck”sche Reihe 1814. München: Beck, 2009.
Ryerson, C. “The Reliability and Quality Control Field from Its Inception to the Present.”
Proceedings of the IRE, 50, no. 5 (1962): 1321–1338.
Schimmel, W. “Der Einfluß von verschiedenen Betriebsfällen einer Kernanlage auf die flüchtigen
radioaktiven Auswürfe: (Fortschrittsbericht).” Kernenergie. Zeitschrift für Kernforschung und
Kerntechnik 13, no. 9 (1970): 274–279.
Schmid, S. D. Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry. Inside
Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Schüring, M. “Advertising the Nuclear Venture: The Rhetorical and Visual Public Relation
Strategies of the German Nuclear Industry in the 1970s and 1980s.” History and Technology
29, no. 4 (2013): 369–398.
Schüring, M. “Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat”: Die evangelischen Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie 1970–1990. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015.
Seipel, H. G. “Standortwahl, Unfallanalyse und andere Sicherheitsfragen bei Kernreaktoren:
Bericht über die Nuclex-Paneldiskussion.” Atomwirtschaft – Atomtechnik 11, no. 12 (1966):
597–598.
Seipel, H. G. “Diskussion über das Konzept des Größten Anzunehmenden Unfalls: Bericht über
das Fachgespräch des IRS in Jülich.” Atomwirtschaft – Atomtechnik 12, no. 3 (1967):
147–148.
Siddall, E. “Statistical Analysis of Reactor Safety Standards.” Nucleonics 17, no. 2 (1959): 64–69.
Sonnenberg, G. S. Hundert Jahre Sicherheit: Beiträge zur technischen und administrativen
Entwicklung des Dampfkesselwesens in Deutschland, 1810 bis 1910. Düsseldorf: VDI-Verl, 1968.
Starr, C. “Social Benefit versus Technological Risk.” Science 165, no. 3899 (1969): 1232–1238.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1727970.
“Still verdunsten.” DER SPIEGEL, August 20, 1979/34.
Taebi, B., and S. Roeser, eds. The Ethics of Nuclear Energy: Risk, Justice, and Democracy in the Post-
Fukushima Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Technikwissenschaften: Erkennen - Gestalten - Verantworten. acatech IMPULS, February 2013.
Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Vieweg, 2013.
Teller, E., and A. Brown. The Legacy of Hiroshima. Garden City: Doubleday, 1962.
Tompkins, A. S. Better Active than Radioactive!: Anti-nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West
Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Summary Report of Reactor Safeguards Committee (WASH-3),
1950.
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. “Theoretical Possibilities and Consequences of Major Accidents
in Large Nuclear Power Plants, WASH-740.” Washington, DC: U.S. AEC, March 1957.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “An Assessment of Accident Risks in U.S. Commercial
Nuclear Power Plants (WASH-1400/NUREG 75/014).” Reactor Safety Study, October 1975.
Uekötter, F. “Fukushima and the Lessons of History: Remarks on the past and Future of Nuclear
Power.” In Europe after Fukushima: German Perspectives on the Future of Nuclear Power, edited
by J. Kersten, S. Temple, F. Uekötter, and M. Vogt, RCC Perspectives, 9–32. Munich: Rachel
Carson Center, 2012.
Verein für Umwelt- und Arbeitsschutz. “Stellungnahme zur ‚Deutschen Risikostudie’ der
Gesellschaft für Reaktorsicherheit.” In Kritik der “Stellungnahme zur Deutschen Risikostudie
der GRS” des Bremer Arbeits- und Umweltschutzzentrums: GRS-36.
Walker, M. German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power: 1939–1949. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Wehner, C. Die Versicherung der Atomgefahr: Risikopolitik, Sicherheitsproduktion und Expertise in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA 1945–1986. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017.
Weisker, A. “Expertenvertrauen gegen Zukunftsangst: Zur Risikowahrnehmung in der
Kernenergie.” In Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen, edited by U. Frevert, 394–421.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003.
Wellock, T. R. “A Figure of Merit: Quantifying the Probability of A Nuclear Reactor Accident.”
Technology and Culture 58, no. 3 (2017): 678–721.
Wengenroth, U. “Von der unsicheren Sicherheit zur sicheren Unsicherheit: Die reflexive
Modernisierung in den Technikwissenschaften.” In Grenzen des Wissens – Wissen um
Grenzen, edited by U. Wengenroth, 193–213. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wiss, 2012.
Wiesenack, G. “The Activities of the German Technische Überwachungs-vereine Relating to the

Safety of Reactor Stations.” In Reactor Safety and Hazard Evaluation Techniques: Proceedings of
the Symposium sponsored by the IAEA and held in Vienna, 14–18 May 1962, ed. vol. 2 of
International Atomic Energy Agency 3–13. Vienna: IAEA.
Wiesenack, G. “Entwicklung der Sicherheitsphilosophie nach dem Modell des GAU.”
Atomwirtschaft - Atomtechnik 12, no. 8/9 (1967): 418–421.
Wiesenack, G. Wesen und Geschichte der Technischen Überwachungsvereine. Köln: Heymann, 1971.
Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Verkehrswesen „Friedrich List,” Sonderheft 52:
Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium „Risiko in Ingenieurtätigkeit und Technik – weltanschaulich-
philosophische Probleme”, February 2–3, 1989.
Woldeck, R. V. “Warnung vor der Wahrscheinlichkeit.” In GAU: Die Havarie der Expertenkultur,
edited by K. M. Michel and T. Spengler, 63–79. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag 63–79, 1986.
Wolf, C. Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1987.
Wyhl-Urteil. Freiburg i. Br.: Dreisam-Verlag, 1977.
Yamada, T. “Safety Evaluation of Nuclear Power Plants.” In vol 2 of Reactor Safety and Hazard
Evaluation Techniques: Proceedings of the Symposium Sponsored by the IAEA and Held in Vienna,
14–18 May 1962, ed. International Atomic Energy Agency., 491–515. Vienna: IAEA, 1962.
Zachmann, K. “Risk in Historical Perspective: Concepts, Contexts, and Conjunctions.” In Risk:
A Multidisciplinary Introduction, edited by C. Klüppelberg, D. Straub, and I. Welpe, 3–36.
Cham: Springer, 2014.
Zwierlein, C. “Sicherheitsgeschichte: Ein neues Feld der Geschichtswissenschaften.” Geschichte
und Gesellschaft 38, no. 3 (2012): 365–386.

Esselborn, Zachmann 2020 Safety by Numbers

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Esselborn, Zachmann 2020 Safety by Numbers

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

History and Technology

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghat20

Nuclear safety by numbers. Probabilistic risk

Stefan Esselborn & Karin Zachmann

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1766916

Published online: 08 Jun 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Nuclear safety by numbers. Probabilistic risk analysis as an

CONTACT Stefan Esselborn Stefan.Esselborn@tum.de

the establishment of a sprawling scientiﬁc infrastructure and a ﬂourishing technical

bureaucrats and experts to present their (subjective) decisions as inescapable corollaries of

of the emergency cooling system.47 To keep the consequences of this particular

Projekt Risikostrategie: The (West) German path to probabilistic risk

Risk in socialism: PRA as evidence practice in the GDR

“Expertenvertrauen gegen Zukunftsangst”; for Switzerland, see Kupper, “Expertise und

20. The formulation goes back to Kleßmann, “Konturen einer integrierten

Unfallanalyse und andere Sicherheitsfragen bei Kernreaktoren”; Wiesenack, “Entwicklung

96. Albers, Gerichtsentscheidungen zu Kernkraftwerken.

Published Sources and Secondary Literature

Carlisle, R. P. “Probabilistic Risk Assessment in Nuclear Reactors: Engineering Success, Public

Franzen, L. F. “Zum Genehmigungsverfahren für Kernkraftwerke.” Technische Überwachung 13,

Wahrnehmungen zur Risikowahrnehmung, edited by B. Rück and U. Becker, 245–259.

Kuhlmann, A., ed. 1. Weltkongress für Sicherheitswissenschaft: Leben in Sicherheit: Tagungsbericht.

Wiesenack, G. “The Activities of the German Technische Überwachungs-vereine Relating to the

You might also like