Risk Estimation and Expert Judgment: The Case of Yucca Mountain

Professor Shrader-Frechette discusses factors responsible for acute disagreement between the federal government and Nevada citizens over potential Risks at Yucca Mountain and focuses on the use of expert judgment, concluding that some of them appear to exemplify bad science. That aside, she argues that 1,000 year predictions cannot be made from current knowledge of geology or, e.g., institutional behavior and concludes that permanent disposal of radioactive waste is currently impossible

Microbial Effects on Repository Performance

This report presents a critical review of the international literature on microbial effects in and around a deep geological repository for higher activity wastes. It is aimed at those who are familiar with the nuclear industry and radioactive waste disposal, but who are not experts in microbiology; they may have a limited knowledge of how microbiology may be integrated into and impact upon radioactive waste disposal safety cases and associated performance assessments (PA)

Public Opinion Surveys in Spent Nuclear Fuel Management

Russia's plans to import foreign SNF for storage and reprocessing meet serious public opposition. As a start of taking into account public concerns, programs of public involvement can be designed and implemented. In the paper, approaches to decision-making on spent nuclear fuel management that differ in their commitment to public participation are discussed. The review of public opinion surveys in Russia that investigated public attitudes to spent fuel is given. Finally, the experience of several countries that have made serious progress in spent fuel management is analyzed with particular attention paid to the programs of public involvement and public opinion surveys. The aim is to understand the role of public opinion surveys in decision-making in this field and to describe how the surveys can be designed and conducted. This information might be useful for designing the programs of public involvement in Russia

A wedge or a weight? Critically examining nuclear power’s viability as a low carbon energy source from an intergenerational perspective

Some integrated assessment studies of climate change have concluded that nuclear energy has a large potential impact on carbon abatement costs. However, these studies have often modeled the cost of nuclear waste management very simply or neglected it entirely. Common difficulties with existing studies include the use of simplistic nuclear waste management cost models and implicitly minimizing costs in the distant future by using discount rates that are arguably inappropriate for intergenerational cost-benefit analysis. These difficulties lead to results that may underestimate the cost of nuclear waste management – and therefore overestimate the value of nuclear energy as a low carbon energy technology. Here, we consider how a more realistic treatment of the nuclear waste disposal problem than has been used in previous studies could affect the viability of nuclear power in the context of integrated assessments of climate change. We construct a generic nuclear waste management cost model to develop cost estimates for nuclear waste management based on current policy, practice, and cost estimates for storage and disposal technologies. Our cost estimates are discounted using conventional constant exponential discounting as and a declining discount rate scheme. Results suggest that the optimism reflected in previous works is fragile: More realistic nuclear waste management cost models and uncertainty-appropriate intergenerational discount rates produce many more scenarios in which nuclear waste management costs are higher than previously assumed. As a consequence, nuclear energy’s economic attractiveness as a low carbon energy option is appears to be lower than earlier works suggested