Multilateral Governance of Nuclear Risks

Nuclear technology creates complex, international, intergenerational and multi-level risks. While these risks add to the institutional complexity of the global system, they also contribute to the emergence of new forms and practices of risk governance. From the outset, the literature on risk governance explicitly acknowledged the “transboundary, international and ubiquitous” nature of risks (Renn 2008, 43). Yet, in the subsequent decade, the multilaterality of risk governance has received little scholarly attention (see also Kuipers et al, 2018). This special issue of Risk, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy will focus on the Multilateral Challenges of Nuclear Risks, whereby it addresses safety and security as well as safeguard issues associated with nuclear risks. In this editorial, we will first discuss what we mean by ‘nuclear risk’ and ‘multilateral governance’. We will wrap up by presenting the papers that deal with these multilateral aspects of nuclear risks.Security and Global Affair

A healthy metaphor? The North Sea consultation and the power of words

The North Sea Consultation was set up to resolve conflicting claims for space in the North Sea. In 2020, this consultation process resulted in the North Sea Agreement, which was supported by the Dutch Parliament and cabinet as a long-term policy; however, the fishing sector felt excluded, left the consultation process, and does not support the agreement. Using semi-constructed interviews and the method of wide reflective equilibrium, this research found that in this conflict the metaphor of ‘health’ has played a decisive role. While all stakeholders want to keep the sea ‘healthy’, they disagree on what a healthy sea actually means, leading to contrastive positions on the desirability of trawler fishing, wind parks, and conservation areas—the North Sea Agreement’s main foci of interest. To prevent the unproductive escalation of such a conflict, it is inevitable to acknowledge the moral connotations of such metaphors, as this allows a decision-making process that can be considered more just.Industrial EcologyEnvironmental Biolog

To Recycle or Not to Recycle? An Intergenerational Approach to Nuclear Fuel Cycles

This paper approaches the choice between the open and closed nuclear fuel cycles as a matter of intergenerational justice, by revealing the value conflicts in the production of nuclear energy. The closed fuel cycle improve sustainability in terms of the supply certainty of uranium and involves less long-term radiological risks and proliferation concerns. However, it compromises short-term public health and safety and security, due to the separation of plutonium. The trade-offs in nuclear energy are reducible to a chief trade-off between the present and the future. To what extent should we take care of our produced nuclear waste and to what extent should we accept additional risks to the present generation, in order to diminish the exposure of future generation to those risks? The advocates of the open fuel cycle should explain why they are willing to transfer all the risks for a very long period of time (200,000 years) to future generations. In addition, supporters of the closed fuel cycle should underpin their acceptance of additional risks to the present generation and make the actual reduction of risk to the future plausible