Stakeholder Participation in the Environmental Clean Up of Radioactive Wastes in the United Kingdom, Japan and United States

We review our program of research on stakeholder participation with environmental cleanup from radioactive wastes in the United States, Japan and United Kingdom (e.g., [21,26,27,66]). Citizen participation programs in all three countries are at different stages: mature in the US, starting in Japan, and becoming operational in the UK. The US issue at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina (SC) had been focused on citizens encouraging Federal (Department of Energy, or DOE; Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA) and State (SC's Department of Health and Environmental Compliance, or DHEC) agencies to aggressively pursue "Plug-in-RODs" at SRS to reduce the paperwork involved in order to accelerate the closure of seepage basins at SRS. The issue in Japan is an effective division of labor among participants and the representation of different perspectives in the deliberation process, including citizens. The UK issue is centered around effective citizen participation with the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Looking at our program of research, our hope is that a review of the programs in these three countries may improve citizen advisory programs

Output performance, institutions and structural policy reforms for transition economies

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of EconomicsE. Wayne NafzigerThis dissertation explores the relationships between three groups of variables in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), from 1989 to 2003. The first group consists of output level and output growth as measured by gross domestic product index (GDPI) and gross domestic product growth (GDPG). The second group consists of two categories of institutional development (INST), and the third group of variables is structural policy reforms (SPR), often known as liberalization policies. This dissertation’s theoretical and empirical framework explicitly account for the endogeneity between output performance variables, the measures of institutional development and SPR. Several empirical specification models of the theoretical simultaneous system of three equations are estimated. In the first group of specification models the dependent endogenous variables are GDPG, SPR and INST, while in the second group the dependant endogenous variables are GDPI, SPR and INST. Moreover, two datasets are used. The first dataset has data from 1989 to 2003, thus covering the whole transition period, while the second dataset is a subset of the first one, containing data for the recovery stage of transition only. The empirical methods used in this dissertation include panel data analysis, principal component analysis, two stages least squares approach and three stage least squares approach in the presence of a SUR modeling procedure. With respect to the output performance equation, the findings of this research indicate that institutional reform (INSTREF), and property rights and contract enforcement institutions (PCINST and ROLINST) are very important determinants of output levels when the whole transition period dataset is used, and very important determinants of both the output levels and output growth rates when the recovery stage dataset is used. While the effect of current SPR is ambiguous, the effect of lagged SPR on output and output growth is positive. Moreover, SPR continue to affect output performance via their indirect effect on institutional development. With respect to the institutional reforms, and property rights and contract enforcement institutions, two sets of determinants were found to be important. On the side of the demand factors, SPR, and especially lagged SPR is found to be an important determinant of both institutional reforms and property rights and contract enforcement institutions. On the side of supply factors, macroeconomic stabilization, a measure of the state’s capacity to implement institutional reform, resulted very important in explaining the variation in institutional reform and property rights and contract enforcement institutions. Political reform, in terms of a shift from the autarkic political regime to a democratic political regime, is found to positively affect institutional development in the recovery stage. With respect to the structural policy reforms’ equations, this dissertation’s main finding is that political reform positively affects SPR in both datasets. Moreover, lagged SPR is found to positively affect SPR, which is an indication of transition governments’ maintained commitment to a package of SPR-s

Public Consent for the Geological Disposal of Highly Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel

A global consensus exists for the geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive wastes, plus interim storage until public consent is obtained. To reach consent, social scientists want a process like consensus-seeking that is less competitive than the majority rule of democracies, often a barrier to consent. However, the competition for consent improves the quality of a choice and its stability with a public when later faced by adverse events (e.g., with a consensus process and no consent, Japan’s repository program was set-back after its tsunami in 2011). We hypothesize that the best path to stable choice occurs when the voices from government, scientific and public interactions compete for the best choice, which generates and processes the information needed to reach and secure consent. We review our theory and the status of consent for the geologic disposal of SNF and HLW in the USA, Japan, UK and Europe