Nuclear waste disposal is a democratic problem par excellence, not least because of the dizzying timescales involved. Whose voices should count? What are the facts and how can they be separated from values? A country’s public sphere and legal system have ultimate bearing on the settlement of these questions. In the USA, top-down, technocratic optimism continues apace. PR Watch:
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) “division in charge of disposal and storage of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, notably the controversial Yucca Mountain project, is on the hunt for a PR firm to develop its communications and public outreach,” reports O’Dwyer’s. DoE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management wants “strategic communications support targeting stakeholders and the public, through outreach programs in public schools and communities, and other elements like web work.” The PR contract is for one year, with four one-year renewals possible. One objective is to develop “fact sheets and other informational materials including traditional hard copy materials as well as electronic media including but not limited to CDs, DVDs, and on-line streaming video.” In 2006, the industry group Nuclear Energy Institute hired the PR firm Hill & Knowlton to promote the Yucca Mountain waste repository, and nuclear power in general.
I can’t wait to see what the outreach program in public schools will look like. I wonder if actor Troy McLure is available?
Across the Atlantic, years of work by Swedish social scientists to build deliberative links with the community after scandals in the 1970s and 80s - including the toppling of a national government - appears to be yielding results. See news here.
Australia doesn’t have high level waste. To deal with our intermediate level waste, however, it looks like the Northern Land Council has settled on a compensation package to the tune of $12m for the use of Muckaty Station in NT. (see radwaste)
Previously: UK initiatives.
Some random comments:
* your source seems to be conflating the DoE (a government department) and the NEI (a lobby group).
* Yucca Mountain is a government program. They have the responsibility to explain what they are doing, and why. Would you prefer they kept it a secret?
* As to the marketing to kiddies, this is always a dodgy area, but prominent anti-nuclear organizations don’t have any compunctions about it. (Though I have to wonder whether Duke anti-nuke is aimed at retrogamers rather than kids…).
DK, I don’t see why nuclear waste is more an essentially democratic problem than the disposal of any other waste. Do radioactive isotopes have a greater vote-swinging capability than inert ones? The disposal of asbestos, for instance, isn’t an electoral hot-potato, though I’d much rather live in any of the Shire suburbs around Lucas Heights than next to a decaying fibro garage.* Ditto heavy metals from industry, ditto most of the unpleasant byproducts of industrial society.
I don’t get why you say the problem is democratic—to me it seems that if we consent to a nuclear society, and in Australia we have done since the 1950s, the problem is inherently an engineering one. The political decision was made generations ago.
*Not that I’d want to live in the Shire, tho’, I wouldn’t want to be exposed to dangerous levels of insularity
The facts do seem to be contestable. Some say the stuff is dangerous forever, whereas James Lovelock says they can bring it aroud to his place any time.