Complex risk-based decisions in radioactive waste management policy are guided by a number of rationalities including probabilistic risk assessments, technical feasibilities, cost-benefit analyses, expert opinions and legal norms. Typically, however, there exists a gap between the risk perceptions of experts and the public, which adversely affects the societal acceptability of these decisions. Eliciting risk-based decision-criteria elements from the elaborate societal argumentation and objectively addressing them in policy decision-making is a complex abstraction issue that will arguably render the decision-making process more transparent and effective in persuading society. In addition, relevant legal elements need to be incorporated objectively for the decisions to be just and equitable to society. This paper proposes a complex Risk-Risk Analysis based socio-legal abstraction approach within a fuzzy decision making framework to support socially persuasive policy decision-making in radioactive waste management. As an illustration, the deep geological repository decision-making problem of ASN, The French Nuclear Safety Authority is abstracted and solved with hypothetical fuzzy rank preferences.
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Rao, S. (2008). A Complex Abstraction Approach to Radioactive Waste Management Policy Decision Making. In: Da Ruan, Hardeman, F., van der Meer, K. (eds) Intelligent Decision and Policy Making Support Systems. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 117. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78308-4_12
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