Abstract
Summary
This is a thesis about technology and to a lesser extent, science. To be more
precise, it is about how a technological society (Norway) tries to protect itself
from risk born from the same technology that is sustaining it. The thesis is
more specifically about how a governmental appointed commission made a
risk assessment on behalf of the Norwegian society in the year 2000. The
commission was commonly referred to as the “Vulnerability Commission”,
since one of it’s main findings was that modern society is becoming
increasingly more vulnerable. This thesis analyses the commissions use of the
“technical” risk concept, where risk is defined as a function of the probability
of possible unwanted events and the consequences of these.
The central theme in this thesis is that “how” risk is defined, is something
that greatly influences how a risk assessment is, and can be done. By choosing
to define risk in this manner, the commission have a priori reduced or
excluded some aspects of risk from the assessment. The main part of this
thesis is therefore about how the choice of a specific risk definition to some
extent “directed” the answers the commission gave in response to it’s
mandate.