Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The United States government has the obligation of managing the high-level nuclear waste, under existing law, from civilian nuclear power generation as well as from its defense activities. Is this obligation being met by the government? The answer is no; the United States currently has no disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel. The problem begins with the claim that nuclear waste is not only a technical but also a so-called sociotechnical problem and, therefore, requires interdisciplinary collaboration between political, technical, social, and environmental approaches in its management. To find an appropriate collaboration, I suggest to utilize inclusive management approach. Inclusive management is a pattern of practices by public managers that facilitate the inclusion of public employees, experts, the public, and politicians in collaboratively addressing public problems or concerns of public interest. The Department of Energy (DOE) has initiated consent-based siting process as it is a way to ensure that communities, tribes and states, as partners, are comfortable with the location of future storage and disposal facilities before they are constructed. The limitation of DOE consent-based process, however, needs to be more investigated and compared by inclusive management dimensions. I put forward this research proposal to discover if the principles of inclusive management can facilitate the siting of high-level nuclear waste, and how we could examine this. For instance, one of the most important aspects of inclusion is ways of knowing. The fairness and justification for the future generations as well as the safety concerns among the ordinary people and experts of a variety of different fields can be addressed by the process of ways of knowing. I will provide a theoretical discussion as well as comparative case studies of Canadian and European countries’ nuclear waste management to find out the similarities and differences between the United States’ nuclear waste management and those cases too.