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Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste: A Long-Term Socio-Technical Experiment

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Abstract

In this article we investigate whether long-term radioactive waste management by means of geological disposal can be understood as a social experiment. Geological disposal is a rather particular technology in the way it deals with the analytical and ethical complexities implied by the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation, because it is presented as a technology that ultimately functions without human involvement. We argue that, even when the long term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted to safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal is still a social experiment. In order to better understand this argument and explore how it could be addressed, we elaborate the idea of social experimentation with the notion of co-production and the analytical tools of delegation, prescription and network as developed by actor-network theory. In doing so we emphasize that geological disposal inherently involves relations between surface and subsurface, between humans and nonhumans, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. In other words, we argue that geological disposal concurrently is a social and a technical experiment, or better, a long-term socio-technical experiment. We end with proposing the idea of ‘actor-networking’ as a sensitizing concept for future research into what geological disposal as a socio-technical experiment could look like.

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Notes

  1. Research into advanced fuel cycles which would include the partitioning, recycling and burning of radioactive waste is ongoing, but there is no consensus about foresights of reaching decisively high degrees of efficiency (see e.g. Schröder 2015).

  2. The time of hazard is referred to as the time required for radioactive decay to have taken place to such a degree that it no longer poses a threat to human health. This involves a complex assessment, but we justify our use of the words ‘forever’ or ‘permanent’ in this regard based on the rudimentary rule of thumb of isotope half-life multiplied by 10: e.g. for Pu-239 alone this would result in 240,000 years, for I-129  in 160 million years.

  3. Certainly other motivations, such as commercial interests—which are served by a ‘permanent solution’ for the waste issue in order to justify the continued production of nuclear energy—are at play next to ethical considerations. But as indicated earlier, in this article we make an analytical separation between the production of radioactive waste on the one hand and its management on the other.

  4. Be it, admittedly, in a retrospective more than a prospective manner.

  5. See for instance www.euridice.be or www.mont-terri.ch.

  6. Just to give an indication, we list some of the GD research projects conducted under the Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2013) of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) (see cordis.europa.eu/fp7/euratom-fission/about-geological_en.html for further information): SKIN—Slow processes in close-to-equilibrium conditions for radionuclides in water/solid systems of relevance to nuclear waste management; RECOSY—Redox phenomena controlling systems; REDUPP—Reducing Uncertainty in Performance Prediction; CROCK—Crystalline rock retention processes; CATCLAY—Processes of Cation Migration in Clayrocks; BELBAR—Bentonite Erosion: effects on the Long term performance of the engineered Barrier and Radionuclide Transport; FORGE—Fate of repository gases; DOPAS—Full Scale Demonstration of Plugs and Seals.

  7. “A safety case demonstrates safety by providing a clear reasoning based on sound scientific and technological principles. […] The safety case is a major set of efforts to achieve the approval of a license application for a specific nuclear waste disposal facility and has to comply with the requirements set up by the national authorities” (IGD-TP 2011, p. 25).

  8. Again, we do not deny that the desirability of this end state in itself may be debatable. For a discussion that goes in this direction, see e.g. Andrén 2012; Taebi 2012. As explained in the introduction, however, we take this goal as a ‘given’: it is our aim to describe the proposal of GD and to evaluate conditions of its implementation, not to discuss RWM as a whole.

  9. Van de Poel concretizes these guidelines with a list of 13 possible conditions for responsible innovation. Although it would be interesting to evaluate all these conditions for the case of GD, this falls beyond the scope and the aim of this paper. We also follow van de Poel when he notes that “More important than the exact conditions is that a list like Table 1 draws attention to at least three aspects of responsible experimentation” (van de Poel 2011, pp. 288–289).

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Acknowledgments

This article was inspired by work conducted within the InSOTEC project, co-supported by the European Atomic Energy Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007/2011) [Grant Number 269906]. The author wishes to thank Michiel Van Oudheusen, Anne Bergmans, Catrinel Turcanu and Ilse Loots as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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  1. University of Antwerp (UA), Antwerp, Belgium

    Jantine Schröder

  2. Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK-CEN), Mol, Belgium

    Jantine Schröder

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Schröder, J. Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste: A Long-Term Socio-Technical Experiment. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 687–705 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9650-4

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