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

Disabled Iranian Veterans: Issues with Health Insurance Coverage and Policy

Background: Health services provided to disabled veterans and families of martyrs play a key role in the health status of this group. Objectives: The current study aimed at investigating the insurance problems faced by veterans and their families. Methods: In 2015, the study was started as a Delphi method with a stratified random sampling of 30 participants among experts and managers of Foundation of Martyr and Veterans Affairs of Tehran, Iran. After data collection, encoding and classification, health insurance problems encountered by veterans were identified. Results: The major medical problems faced by veterans were issues related to insurance company policies, financial partnership, insurance coverage, decision-makers, service systems, and the evaluation and monitoring of insurance claims. Conclusions: It is necessary to design and introduce an intra-organisational and independent insurance system under the category of 'health insurance for veterans and their dependents' to provide preventive and remedial health services for the targeted group

How to Weigh Values in Value Sensitive Design: A Best Worst Method Approach for the Case of Smart Metering

Proactively including the ethical and societal issues of new technologies could have a positive effect on their acceptance. These issues could be captured in terms of values. In the literature, the values stakeholders deem important for the development of technology have often been identified. However, the relative ranking of these values in relation to each other have not been studied often. The best worst method is proposed as a possible method to determine the weights of values, hence it is used in an evaluative fashion. The applicability of the method is tested by applying it to the case of smart meters, one of the main components of the smart grid. The importance of values is examined for three dimensions of acceptance namely sociopolitical, market, and household acceptance.Ibo van de Poel’s contribution to this publication was part of the project ValueChange that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 788321.Economics of Technology and InnovationTransport and LogisticsEthics & Philosophy of TechnologyValues Technology and Innovatio

Self-assembled quantum-dot semiconductor optical devices

NRC publication: Ye