Radioactive Waste Governance, State of the Art & Future Needs

During the past decade, a positive evolution towards more openness, transparency and communication can be observed within RWM. The proven failed technocratic, top down approach is slowly and gradually changed towards a governance approach. Governance can be described as an inclusive, multidisciplinary, consensus directed process of human interactions wrt intricate problems. It aims to accept complexity and uncertainty as inherent characteristics of reality to be dealt with, not as problems to be solved. Despite this positive and pragmatically speaking inevitable evolution in RWM, stakeholders on both sides of the spectrum as to speak, cannot deny the persistent fragility of trust and proneness to misunderstanding. Scientist and industry on the one hand and the public on the other, often end up baffled with each others vocabulary and underlying motives. Although this confrontation may well be inherently unavoidable, we will argue that at least part of the potential stagnation due to it, as well as the explanation thereof, have to do with the fact that RWM has come to focus mainly on conditions for acceptance instead of on a genuine exercise of justification. The prominent issue of compensation will be explored as an illustrative example of this focus and its difficulties.