Branko Kontic

Jozef Stefan Institute Slovenia

1. Introduction

The key topics of this chapter are i) comparative evaluation of various energy options, and ii) radioactive waste disposal. Both are treated from the strategic planning and assessment points of view and are supported by a discussion of multi-objective decision-making. Environmental considerations are foremost. The discussion is focused on the uppermost level of societal energy planning, and attempts to answer strategic questions concerned with the comparative evaluation of various energy options and waste disposal. It is guided by a number of questions as illustrated in Table 1. The Table also indicates in which sub-chapter a certain, more specific discussion can be found.

The author is a natural scientist, experienced in research and preparation of different types of environmental impact and risk assessments. At the present time — January 2012 — after more than 30 years of practice in the field he is astonished by the increasing inefficiency of formal guidance on evaluation of environmental impacts. He wonders why is this so and is especially disappointed when seeing that even the highest administrative level EU institutions, the DG Environment and DG Regional Policy, do not succeed in implementing the guides on performing strategic environmental assessments. For example, the DG Regional Policy and Cohesion provided a guide for the ex-ante evaluation of the environmental impact of regional development programmes in 1999 (EC, 1999) as complementary to the Handbook on Environmental Assessment of Regional Development Plans and EU Structural Fund Programmes (EC, 1998). These were a kind of predecessor of the EU Directive 2001/42/EC (usually referred to as the strategic environmental assessment — SEA Directive). Despite the fact that the guides clearly stress the importance of establishing an interactive relationship between evaluation and planning — the objective of the integration is to improve and strengthen the final quality of the plan or programme under preparation — more than 10 years afterwards Member States fail to follow them and report on a number of difficulties in SEA implementation (EC, 2009). The most important deficiency in the current practice of SEA in certain EU countries is still the approval/permitting context of the use of SEA instead of the planning context and optimisation of plans, and the mixed use (misuse) of project level environmental impact assessment — EIA and SEA. SEA is very often used for the evaluation of specific projects, while EIA is used at higher, i. e. strategic, levels, sometimes even for the evaluation of sustainability of plans and programmes (Kontic & Kontic, 2011). This situation stimulated the author to prepare the present condensed overview

of research and consultancy results on strategic considerations of nuclear power. His aim is that this will contribute to the desired change of implementation of strategic evaluation in the area of energy production and elsewhere.

Comparative information about the environmental impacts of various energy systems can assist in the evaluation of energy options and consequent decision making. Over the last thirty years a number of studies have attempted to quantify such impacts for a wide range of energy sources. These estimations have taken different approaches, from impacts of fuel acquisition through to waste disposal (IAEA, 2000). Recent major studies have been completed and new studies begun in which nuclear power is either supported — justification through e. g. climate change issues or low-carbon society — or criticised — justification through e. g. accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, or waste related issues. The results of the studies provide useful insights and help to promote further studies of impacts for many technologies and sites. However, the strategic level of these considerations still remains less well covered and a number of questions are still unanswered. This chapter is aimed as a contribution to filling these gaps.

Related to the radioactive waste issue, the siting of a disposal facility or final repository is a task with unique traits that are clearly associated with changes in the surrounding world. A number of questions can be posed regarding how ongoing and future changes in technology, views, politics and practices in other parts of the world, concerning e. g. energy supply, nuclear power and nuclear waste, may affect national decisions regarding the approach and decisions involved in successful and safe disposal of the waste. National trends in politics, economy and opinion also influence events and views, locally and nationally (SKB, 2011). The decision-making process has to fulfil certain democratic expectations and criteria: openness, transparency, participation. So far, known and applied approaches have not been efficient or effective in solving the primary issue of participatory decision-making in this area, i. e. proper, fair and balanced consideration of specific priorities and interests. Neither weight assignment, as a representative method rooted in (expert) opinion and value judgements, nor methods based on statistics and probability theory (applicable for measurable attributes) have proved successful for this purpose. Maybe ‘approval voting’ (Laukkanen et al., 2002) is the closest to what is widely understood as participative/democratic decision making. It appears, on the other hand, that a continuous engagement process, sound and consistent, scientifically supported and respected by all involved parties, which deals adequately with uncertainties related to long-term predictions/evaluations — as applied in Finland and Sweden — can provide satisfactory results (SKB, 2011). The approach applied in Slovenia for identifying and approving a site for a low and intermediate level radioactive waste disposal facility could also be seen as being successful, and is presented in more detail in Section 3. In summary, it builds on social acceptance of predictive uncertainty based on so-called "local partnership" i. e. the community is actively involved in the siting process and has a right of veto, together with a comprehensive investigation of the perceptions of the types of consequences rather than the likelihood of their occurrence. The underlying basis of the approach is that it is more promising to investigate which consequences of a certain alternative are more likely to be accepted by society than how likely these consequences are to occur. Thus, as many feasible alternatives as possible should be evaluated, so that the parties involved can express their preferences rather than just "yes/no", or "accept/reject" responses. This is clearly in line with the basic philosophy of SEA and strategic considerations of nuclear power.

2. Comparative evaluation of environmental impacts of various energy systems