Taming uncertainty: towards a new governance approach for nuclear waste management in Belgium

Abstract

We focus on the new governance practices in Belgian nuclear waste management (NWM) from its ‘participatory turn’ in the late 1990s. Rather than praising (or rejecting) participation versus expert analysis, we make use of a theoretical and analytical framework in which the relevant dynamics for the analysis are ‘opening up’ and ‘closing down’ technological appraisals and commitments. Even though NWM agencies often plead for an integrative approach between expert analysis and stakeholder participation, in practice both exercises are often kept separate. We address this separation and its consequences and we find that societal concerns remain subsumed in the technical options that have long been favoured by the Belgian agency. This article encourages scholars, waste managers, and decision-makers to scrutinise the moments and situations in which opening up would be desirable, and when, by contrast, it would be better to close down options in NWM.

Keywords:

• nuclear waste management
• participatory/expert analysis
• strategic management
• opening up/closing down

Acknowledgements

We warmly thank Nicolas Rossignol for his valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Content and Jeanne for their technical support. Finally, we are very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely valuable comments and recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Céline Parotte is a political scientist and a Ph.D. Student at the SPIRAL research centre, Department of Political Science, University of Liège, since 2012. Her research areas involve the NWM in Belgium, France, and Canada, participatory methods, and science and technology in society.

Pierre Delvenne holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences. He is currently Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and the Associate Director of the SPIRAL research centre at the University of Liège, where he coordinates the research unit in science, technology, and society.

Notes

1. A stakeholder is defined as a person or a group who could affect or be affected by an issue (Welpa et al., 2006).

2. Whereas eight interviewees may not seem like much, we stress here that we have been nearly exhaustive in interviewing all informants who have been initiating and managing the process of preparation, elaboration and writing of the SEA and the waste plan. They are the (1) General Director, (2) the Director of general services in charge of communication, (3) the Director of long-term management and (4) the General Director of EURIDICE, adviser on safety aspects at ONDRAF, (5) one employee of the long-term management staff, (6) one employee of the communication staff, (7) one representative of Resource Analysis and (8) one member of the Board of Directors.

3. To address these new environmental requirements of the law of 13th February 2006, a specific Advisory Committee was created, composed of a body of public officials representative of the main federal ministries, which had the task to consult every actor whose formal advice is required by the law (for instance, the Federal Council of Sustainable Development).

4. Resource Analysis’ is a consultancy company today known as the ‘Technum’ (division of Tractebel Engineering in Belgium) unit of Suez group. At the time of SEA's elaboration, it was an independent consultancy firm specialised in Environmental Impact Assessment.

5. This group was composed of the General Direction representatives, the Director of Long-Term Management, the Director of Communication, as well as several internal safety advisers and internal communication advisers. Depending on the actual needs, some advisers changed over time (De Preter 2013; Vanhove 2013).

6. Greenpeace refused to participate in the earlier societal consultations but the NGO participated as an expert in the consensus conference, and later it sent numerous arguments during the legal public consultation phase.

7. They were 84. Most of them were ‘hard’ scientists coming from regulatory bodies (AFCN/FANC), SCK/CEN or universities.

8. The only difference was that the interdisciplinary conference went one step further: participants had to prioritise, test and reformulate the different options (Zwetkoff and Parotte 2013).

9. Even if 80% of the expressed opinions primarily came from an NGO's cyber activism, ONDRAF considered each of them individually.

10. Nevertheless, it seems that societal consultations mostly provoked a cultural change for HLRW managers. They learned to vulgarise their research towards the general public and to get out of their usual technical framing:

The public is more interested in operational elements and the safety issues on two or three generations only. (…) It has been a real change for ONDRAF, which now asks its R&D Department to focus on additional operational aspects never explored before. (Lalieux 2013, 12, own translation).

Although crucial, this point is not the object of this article, as what we analyse here is how ONDRAF transferred all the collected inputs into the waste plan.