4.1.3 Defining public acceptability

Throughout the previous section we have shown how during the past decade advances have been made with regard to the treatment of public acceptability of the nuclear fuel cycle, particularly at the back end with regard to radioactive waste management. Although these are positive changes, the following observations should be taken into consideration. First, problems of public acceptability, especially when they concern the front and back ends of the nuclear fuel cycle, are often approached as an issue of NIMBY or LULU and, consequently, the public is mainly defined as the local community. Second, issues of public acceptance have so far mainly been addressed separately within each step of the nuclear fuel cycle, with the most dedicated focus being on siting issues at the back end of the fuel cycle. This is in fact the part where the notion of acceptability is most limited in scope, as it concerns the part of the cycle that is a given (nuclear waste exists and will continue to do so in the far future, with or without a continuation of nuclear power generation).

In light of these observations, the following considerations are notable. It is only relevant to talk about public acceptability when the public is aware of a proposal and given a genuine opportunity to accept it or not. Although local communities are indeed crucial stakeholders, we are talking about ‘public acceptability’ and not about ‘local public acceptability’. This suggests that the issue needs to be defined in a way that takes it beyond NIMBY and LULU situations. We are not arguing here that the question of how to treat radioactive waste (high-level waste and spent fuel in particular) and issues of (local) acceptability could not or should not be pursued to some extent independently of outstanding issues regarding other steps of the nuclear fuel cycle. It is understandable that one may want to avoid the decision-making process on, say, radioactive waste management becoming bogged down in debates about the merits of nuclear power as a whole. Nevertheless, we do not consider that acceptance of a radioactive waste management disposal facility by an interested local community (for whatever reason) serves as a legitimate argument that the waste problem is fully solved (as that will still need to be proven in practice, and decisions on final closure will need to be made not just at the local level), and therefore that general public acceptability for the whole nuclear fuel cycle is covered.

The previous paragraph highlights the importance of further investigating and refining what public acceptability of the nuclear fuel cycle does, could and perhaps should in fact refer to. We have already pointed out that the efforts with regard to gaining public acceptability have so far focused largely on better explaining technical safety aspects. For sure this research and communication about its results are highly relevant. Advanced probabilistic risk assessments offer a quantitative characterization of the safety of a system, an estimate of the probability of failures and their consequences. Such assessments nevertheless do not say how safe is safe enough. Such a judgement firstly relates significantly to the notion of confidence as we have come to mention it several times. Risk research has repeatedly pointed out the centrality of the degree of public suspicion towards nuclear industries, utilities and implementers, and of mistrust towards the institutions that assess and regulate the risks (Kasperson et al., 1980: 16; Slovic, 1999). Reports in the media and public responses in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident once again confirm this.

But even if confidence were there, probabilistic risk assessments alone do not suffice to answer the question about how safe is safe enough. Uncertainty is, in a sense, inherent in engineering, financing and regulating advanced technologies: unless one is able to build a full-scale prototype and to test it under all the precise conditions that could be encountered in practice, there is always the uncertainty of extrapolating the safety case to new and untried circumstances (Weinberg, 1992: 6). A full-scale prototype would, for instance, mean one including realistic timeframes (e. g. keeping radioactive waste management in mind); testing all potential precise conditions would for instance mean including grave, improbable events (thinking e. g. about Fukushima). Quantitative data thus provide crucial input for safety judgements, but the meaning one attributes to numbers and figures and the remaining uncertainty they reveal, in the end always depends on the interpretation one makes of them. Such interpretations cannot take place in a vacuum, but are balanced out against and deliberated within a broader epistemological, societal, political, economic, ethical, . . . context. The question of how safe is safe enough and how much uncertainty is acceptable, and the confidence the answers to these questions do or do not evoke, is crucially framed within a broader questioning of the desirability of the benefits the technology in question offers, i. e., for our case, a questioning mainly of how badly electricity from fission is needed (Weinberg, 1992: 288).

The desirability of nuclear energy (and in fact of any technology) has to do with fundamental values and beliefs, connected to, for example, how it matches with one’s worldviews (e. g. Slovic and Peters, 1998) and with one’s opinions about justice (e. g. Behnam, 2012). Both worldviews and opinions about justice are informed by facts, but fundamentally characterised by value-based pluralism. In this context, worldviews are related to opinions about e. g. the politics of ‘neo­liberal corporate powers’, the acceptability of ‘misusable’ technology, and which, and to what extent, ‘externalities’ (such as potential environmental pollution) should be reflected in economic calculations. Opinions about (procedural and distributional) justice in this context are connected to e. g. the difficulties of democratic control of complex and centralised technologies such as nuclear, and intra — and intergenerational ethics in relation to waste.

Alvin Weinberg, known to many as the father of the light-water reactor, describes such matters with the notion of ‘trans-science’. ‘Here was a technology that sprang full-blown from science — but the many controversies that nuclear power spawned too often involved questions that could be posed in a scientific idiom yet could not be answered by science’ (Weinberg, 1992: 1). Trans-scientific questions are ‘questions that can be asked of science and yet cannot be answered by science’ (Idem: 4). Just because technologies spring from science it does not follow that the controversies they cause can be answered by science. Trans-scientific matters are inherent to all parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, in connection to siting issues, technical options and nuclear energy as a whole. A scientist may have valuable ideas on trans­scientific matters, related to safety interpretations, confidence and desirability, but these ideas are based on opinions, intuitions, beliefs and assumptions, and only partially on facts that can be proven with certainty. One of the major challenges related to public acceptability and the nuclear fuel cycle thus lies in creating fora where such trans-scientific matters can be deliberated by all stakeholders (nuclear scientists, engineers, industry leaders, implementers, regulators, politicians and all engaged members of the local, national and international civil society) willing to revive the Enlightenment motto ‘think for yourself’.