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Avoiding Disaster Through the “Reconsideration Trigger”: Preventing Runaway Nuclear Power Projects

This article offers a prescription that could help to prevent the runaway projects that have so often made headlines. This topic is of special importance in Asia, which is currently the world center of nuclear power plant construction, with more than 100 nuclear construction projects either under way or planned. Although we begin with lessons learned from past nuclear power projects, the lessons go beyond any one industry and indeed can be applied to all large projects. The article first examines the historical and contemporary contexts of the nuclear industry and then looks into psychosocial and organizational forces that permit large projects to go out of control. Building on this, we propose an improved tool we call the “reconsideration trigger”: a threshold set in the project's planning phase, which, when breached, allows a failing effort to be redirected before it reaches the status of runaway project.