Nuclear Waste Management: Security and Safety Implications

Abstract

Helbing (Nature 497, [20: 51]) poignantly argues that ‘Globalization and technological revolutions are changing our planet’. Along with the benefits and opportunities associated with worldwide collaboration networks comes ‘pathways along which dangerous and damaging events can spread rapidly and globally’. Given the significant nuclear footprint throughout the Asia/Pacific, issues pertaining to nuclear waste management resonate with Beck’s risk discourse on how distinctively modern manufactured risks are both temporally and spatially displaced. Many Asia/Pacific countries, including Japan and South Korea are facing increasingly large nuclear fuel stocks, with safe space for surface storage growing tight. A key event complicating nuclear power waste storage in the region was the Fukushima nuclear accident, which increased the nuclear waste profile while complicating storage siting by elevating public concern and diminishing trust in nuclear industries and regulators (Rich in Struggling with Japan’s nuclear waste, six years after disaster, [45]). At the same time, equally salient manufactured risks from global climate change due to fossil fuel consumption are contending with nuclear risks, adding urgency to the optimization of cradle-to-grave energy life cycle decisions. All in all, the manufactured risk landscape calls for “reflective practices” that leverage the theoretical frameworks of risk perception and risk communication to shed light on issues challenging the Asia/Pacific region. In this chapter, we draw upon theoretical orientations of cultural cognition of risk (Kahan in J Sci Commun 14(3):1–10, [27]), responsible innovation (Guston and Sarewitz in Technol Soc 24(1–2):93–109, [17]), and design thinking as a lens for reflection and guidance to enable more constructive and conciliatory nuclear waste decision-making within the Asia/Pacific region.