Nuclear waste panel fails to address underlying mistrust
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Rosa |
PULLMAN – A renewed federal effort to fix the nation’s stalled nuclear waste program is focusing so much on technological issues that it fails to address the public mistrust hampering storage and disposal efforts.
Writing in the latest issue of the journal Science, 16 researchers from around the country say a special White House panel on high-level radioactive waste needs to focus more on the social and political acceptability of its solutions to succeed.
But the psychological and social sciences have learned a lot about how the public has come to view the risks of nuclear waste and can inform policy on selecting stakeholders, discussing the issues and integrating both technical and lay knowledge.
“Taking advantage of this knowledge would be a very inexpensive step in developing a publically acceptable solution to the nuclear waste problem,” says Rosa.