Preventing risk and promoting resilience in radiation health

Because risk assessment is fundamentally deficient in the face of unknown or unforeseeable events and disasters such as occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, resilience thinking, which focuses on the ability of both natural and human-made systems to prepare for, absorb, and recover from an adverse event and to adapt to new conditions is an important additional consideration in decision making. Radiation contamination is an impediment to most critical functions of a community; resilience planning considers how those critical functions will be maintained in the event that radiation contamination does occur. Therefore, planning should begin with resilience-based thinking and should be complemented with risk assessment-based tools. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2016;12:677-679. Published 2016. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.