National Policy and Academic Research Trends on Nuclear Safety in Japan Since the Fukushima Disaster

Due to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, the government and industries that should be responsible for nuclear safety have totally lost their trust from public. To regain the credibility after the disaster, the Government of Japan cooperated with the Atomic Energy Society of Japan to create a "Roadmap for Technology and Human Resources for Light Water Reactor Safety" to share the priority of technology and human resource development with electric utilities, plant manufacturers, academia, central/local governments, and residents. We first applied citation network analysis exploring interrelationships between the 18,145 papers on nuclear plant safety and key technology categories defined in the government safety roadmap. We then evaluated which technology domains are strongly affected by the Fukushima disaster using a time series analysis of annual numbers of publications. We further quantified the impact of Japan's recent academic contributions on each technical domain of nuclear safety research compared to the worldwide trend. The results quantitatively identified areas where Japanese researchers' contributions are relatively low despite the importance described in the road map. We believe our results contribute to evaluating the government's policy according to quantitative evidence derived from bibliometric data.