Original research articleThe discursive politics of nuclear waste: Rethinking participatory approaches and public perceptions over nuclear waste storage repositories in Switzerland
Introduction
Reviewing the national and international efforts of governments and experts to find suitable solutions for maintaining sustainable energy production makes it clear that the process is neither simple nor straightforward. One type of energy, however, is especially controversial and poses policy makers with a difficult task: nuclear power. The question of whether to build, maintain, or phase out nuclear power plants is a hot topic among the governments and citizens of many nuclear-energy-producing countries. The resulting byproduct of nuclear waste (from not only the generation of nuclear power but also weapons production, industry, and research in medicine and pharmaceuticals) creates the challenge of finding the most suitable solution for storing this toxic waste for hundreds of thousands of years—a challenge which several nations have not yet found a solution to [1].
Many scholars working in this domain have conducted quantitative studies on factors related to nuclear issues, including attitudes, values, and perceptions of risks and benefits (see e.g., [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]). Such research has provided important insights, but real-life content and individual viewpoints have often been neglected due to the difficulties of collecting and analyzing qualitative data. The aim of the present longitudinal survey was to provide insights to improve the participatory process in the site selection of nuclear waste repositories based on descriptive data gathered from open-ended questions.
Section snippets
Policy process for nuclear waste
Countries across the world face the problem of nuclear waste repositories [9]. Currently, most nuclear waste is stored near nuclear power plants, either in water-filled pools at reactor sites or in canisters at nearby interim storage facilities. From a technical point of view, researchers can agree based on scientific knowledge that deep-geological repositories (DGRs) are the most suitable solution for nuclear waste storage [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], but the process of building such
Participants
The longitudinal-design questionnaire was distributed online by a market research institute. The target population was in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, where the original six potential DGR sites are. This region has also seen more debate and conversation about the topic than the French- and Italian-speaking regions [29]. Participants were selected from a panel with defined balanced quota for gender and age, as well as for their location in potentially affected or unaffected region.
General opinion in 2014 and 2015
The results on the reported general opinions on DGRs in Switzerland in 2014 showed a very positive tendency in favor of DGRs (M = 5.38, SD = 1.69). One-way analysis of variance ANOVA detected a significant gender difference in general opinion, as women (M = 4.87, SD = 1.74) were less in favor of DGRs than men (M = 5.75, SD = 1.56, F(1,785) = 55.36, p < 0.001). The general opinion reported in 2015 also showed that participants were very much in favor of DGRs in Switzerland (M = 5.65, SD = 1.62). Again, we found a
Conclusions and policy implications
This research was intended to complement the literature on the participatory processes involved in the siting of nuclear waste repositories, focusing on the concrete case of Switzerland. The inclusion of descriptive data was adopted to shed light on the spontaneous associations to the concrete topic, aimed at representing the arguments they would raise in public discussions.
The study’s results suggest that the arguments used during debates on DGRs mostly focus on concerns related to justice and
Acknowledgments
Funding: This work was supported by a grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and ETH Zürich, TdLab. Funding grant Nr.: 407040_154028.
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