Beck,From Industrial Society to Risk Society 107 the privilege handed down to them from the Kaiser's days,the right to determine according to their own internal standards the global social question of the most intensely political nature:how safe is safe enough? The power of the hard sciences here rests on a simple social construct.They are granted the binding authority -binding for law and politics -to decide on the basis of their own standards what the'state of technology'demands.But since this general clause is the legal standard for safety,private organizations and com- mittees(for instance,the Society of German Engineers,the Institute for Standards)decide in Germany the amount of hazards to which everyone can be subjected (see Wolf,1987). If one asks,for instance,what level of exposure to artificially produced radioactivity must be tolerated by the populace,that is, where the threshold of tolerance separating normality from hazard- ousness is situated,then the Atomic Energy Act gives the general answer that the necessary precautions are to correspond to 'the state of technology'(Sec.7 II No.3).This phrase is fleshed out in the Guidelines'of the Reactor Safety Commission an 'advisory council'of the Ministry of the Environment in which representatives of engineering societies hold sway. In air pollution policy,noise protection and water policy one always finds the same pattern:laws prescribe the general pro- gramme.But anyone who wishes to know how large a continuing ration of standardized pollution citizens are expected to tolerate needs to consult the'Ordinance on Large Combustion Facilities'or the Technical Instructions:Air Quality'and similar works for the (literally)'irritating'details. Even the classical instruments of political direction -statutes and administrative regulations -are empty in their central state- ments.They juggle with the 'state of technology',thus undercutting their own competence,and in its place they elevate 'scientific and technical expertise'to the throne of the civilization of threat. This monopoly of scientists and engineers in the diagnosis of hazards,however,is simultaneously being called into question by the 'reality crisis'of the natural and engineering sciences in their dealings with the hazards they produce.It has not been true only since Chernobyl,but there it first became palpable to a broad public:safety and probable safety,seemingly so close,are worlds apart.The engineering sciences always have only probable safety at their command.Thus,even if two or three nuclear reactors Downloaded from lcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17,2012Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17, 2012