John Law's 2011 essay applies Perrow's Normal Accident Theory to explain both the Fukushima meltdown and the UK's 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic as heterogeneous-system failures

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In "Heterogeneous Engineering and Tinkering" (2011), delivered eight months after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, sociologist John Law revisits his own 1987 concept of "heterogeneous engineering" and reaches for Charles Perrow's 1984 Normal Accident Theory to explain two disasters at once: the Fukushima meltdown and the United Kingdom's 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic. Law frames both as failures of tightly-coupled, complex systems that are not purely technical but "heterogeneous" — combining social, technical, and natural elements (reactors and regulators; livestock, farmers, and disease-control policy) — in which no single discipline, engineering or sociology alone, is equipped to manage the whole. He concludes that responding to such failures requires a new kind of practitioner: "What we need instead are heterogeneous engineers... a new profession that needs to be invented."

The essay is a first-person, real-time reckoning rather than a formal academic argument — Law is applying his own 24-year-old concept to a disaster still unfolding at the time of writing, using Perrow's nuclear-safety theory as the connecting frame between a reactor failure and an agricultural epidemic.