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

‘Job opportunities for the youth’: Competing and overlapping discourses on youth unemployment and work informality in Egypt

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. Employment informality, or employment without access to work contracts and social insurance, is the norm for Egypt’s working youth, including educated youth. Despite the policy focus on youth as a demographic group, particularly after the country’s recent political developments, informality and precariousness remain largely absent from the policy discourse in Egypt. Youth unemployment rates continue to be the main yardstick for youth welfare in the country. Drawing on Bacchi’s ‘What is the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, the analysis in this article seeks to elucidate the implicit assumptions in this policy approach. The article juxtaposes the policy discourse on youth unemployment and informality to that of interviewed educated youth working informally. The two discourses overlap in assigning the state a central role in providing jobs in the public service for youth and in marginalizing the potential to address issues of employment precariousness outside such jobs. They are in discord, however, when young people articulate strong feelings of injustice when these prized jobs are not made available