Consent-Based Siting of Nuclear Waste Facilities

Project Overview

Consent of host communities, including both relevant authorities and the broader public, is widely seen as a necessary component of a siting process, essential to producing durable and legitimate partnerships with the government authority responsible for nuclear waste management. This is true domestically (Metlay 2013, Sachs 1996, Jefferies 2007, DOE 2013, DOE 2014, Shrader-Frechette 1993) and internationally (Metlay 2013, Wilding 2014), and this principle was recently reiterated by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (Blue Ribbon Commission 2012). The emergence of consent in the nuclear waste context has paralleled its emphasis in decision making about extractive resources and hazardous facility siting, including dams and mines, particularly in indigenous communities (Environmental Law Institute 2004, Owen and Kemp 2014, Goodland 2004, Lesbirel and Shaw 2000).

With an eye toward informing proposals for consent-based siting of nuclear waste facilities in the United State we have explored core principles and challenges associated with the concept of consent in multiple disciplinary and practical applications, including medical treatment, human subjects research ethics, international development, land-use planning, environmental justice, and political theory. These frameworks make clear that there are no universal objective standards that can be used to define a consent-based process. At the same time, they also underscore how collective, social decisions have been made to define and operationalize core principles.  The ways that core principles have been defined in these other contexts can be used to inform discussions of how to operationalize a consent-based process for siting of facilities in a nuclear waste program in the United States.

Key challenges for a US SNF and defense HLW management program using a consent-based approach include:

·      The challenge of first agreeing that action is needed
·      Challenges raised by the need to protect the process from external pressure and coercion
·      Challenges raised by socio-technical complexity
·      Challenges raised by social distrust
·      The challenge of meeting the requirement for full disclosure of information
·      The challenge of meeting the requirement that understanding be “adequate”
·      Challenges raised by trade offs and expectations for negotiated agreements
·      Challenges to meeting the requirement consent be voluntary
·      Challenges associated with who issues consent and for whom
·      Challenges associated with determining consent in a nested hierarchy of political jurisdictions
·      Challenges associated with procedures for how and when consent is expressed
·      Challenges raised by competing motivations for consent
·      Challenges grounded in different standards for consent
·      Challenges associated with the absence of a legally defined consent-seeker  

Publications