Collectively building an operational monitoring system for geological disposal: a case of 'lab participation'

Modern 2020 Projec

Modern 2020- "Engaging Local Stakeholders in Research and Development of Monitoring Systems for High-Level Radioactive Waste Repositories"

Modern2020 is an international, EU funded research project that runs from June 2015 until June 2019. The project focuses on research, development and demonstration of monitoring strategies and technologies for high-level radioactive waste repositories. The project starts from the premise that monitoring inside these deep underground repositories has the potential to contribute to technical and social needs related to the management and disposal of high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel. This research project has the ambition to establish a common ground for monitoring activities within the EU, by developing and implementing a repository operational monitoring programme, driven by safety case needs and taking into account the requirements of specific national context, as well as public stakeholder expectations. One of the main challenges of this project is to include public stakeholders’ expectations as soon as possible in the program. In other words, citizen stakeholders should be able to criticize, to ask questions and to comment on every phase of the research and development monitoring programs. In this light, as part of WP5, a Local Stakeholders Workshop was organised from September 12th to 14th in Antwerp.Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018 under grant agreement No 662177; Modern 2020 Projec

Repository Monitoring in the Context of Repository Governance

This report summarizes the social scientific component of the Modern2020 project (work package 5). This package has four objectives: i) to actively engage local public stakeholders in repository monitoring R&D within the Modern2020 project, and to analyse the impact this has on both the participating stakeholders’ and the project partners’ understanding of, and expectations regarding, repository monitoring; ii) to define more specific ways for integrating public stakeholder concerns and expectations into specific repository monitoring programmes, iii) to develop ideas on how to ensure accessibility and transparency of monitoring data (of the type gathered through in-situ monitoring) to public stakeholders, and iv) to learn lessons on how local stakeholder groups could be engaged effectively with R&D programmes and projects at an EU level.Project Modern 2020 - Development and Demonstration of monitoring strategies and technologies for geological disposal; Project co-funded by the European Commission under the Euratom Research and Training Programme on Nuclear Energy within the Horizon 2020 Framework Programm

High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent fuel as Matters of Care: Assembling Neglected Things for their Futures. Final Results of the ONDRAF/NIRAS project - ULiège, UA and UMaastricht

This project highlighted how the current assessment of B&C waste program and its future is not only a matter of facts, it is also a matter of concerns (Latour 2004) and for some actors, clearly matter of care (de la Bellacasa 2011). B&C waste and spent fuel have a social life: how to manage such radioactive materials is not only a matter of established facts but it is also a matter of interests, a ‘matter of concerns’. They are indeed intimately interrelated: ‘Matters of facts are processes of entangled concerns’ (De La Bellacasa, 2011, p.89). Concerns attach and hold together matters of fact and contribute to affirming their reality by adding further articulations’ (id.) ONDRAF/NIRAS, like each actor involved in the management program, produce ‘matters of concerns’ strongly entangled with its matter of facts. In some case, things can be more than interrelated matters of facts and concerns: they are ‘matters of care’. But what does it mean exactly? In any situation, if we ask yourselves: ‘is it a fact?’, ‘Am I concerned?’ or ‘do I care?’, our practices, our discourses and our engagement on an issue differ (de la Bellacasa 2011). Applied to B&C waste and spent fuel, it could be ‘waste are already here and it must be managed’ versus ‘I’m concerned by the faith of such radioactive materials’ versus ‘I care about the way to handle them’. Then, considering the B&C waste as matters of care changes the way we are engaged in the program and the way we frame it