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Title
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Monitoring the underground : what role for repository monitoring in the governance of geological disposal for nuclear waste?
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Author
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Abstract
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| This report is produced as a social sciences’ contribution to the Horizon2020 EURATOM project Modern2020. It seeks to enable a better understanding of how monitoring the underground plays and can play a part in the governance of deep disposal facilities for nuclear waste. For this purpose, several aspects of repository monitoring technology development are addressed in two main parts. The first part focuses on how four nuclear waste management organizations (NWMO’s) in the countries of Sweden, Finland, Belgium and France plan to monitor future repositories housing high-level nuclear waste. The report describes how the NWMO’s frame the notion of monitoring, how they report on their plans to monitor future repositories, what role and weight is given to underground repository monitoring within the facility (as the development of such technology is the core focus of Modern2020), and what legislative demands there are in the respective countries. The second part looks at the role and framing of underground monitoring in the case of carbon capture and storage as another example of a technology designed for the perpetual safekeeping of a hazardous substance in deep geological formations. The report draws on document analysis and in-depth analysis of on the one hand legislative documents, and on the other hand a questionnaire created for NWMO’s in Modern2020. By analysing the NWMO’s in the four countries individually, it is shown that legislative demands vary significantly between the countries and that the respective NWMOs have divergent plans for underground monitoring. Moreover, it is shown that the notion of monitoring in nuclear waste management (NWM) is not uniform; the NWMOs all have divergent views on when, why (not) and how to monitor. A central conclusion regarding carbon capture and storage is that this technology has integrated underground repository monitoring, as well as post closure monitoring into its core concept. This is somewhat different from geological disposal of nuclear waste, where underground monitoring is not always of such central importance and post closure monitoring in most cases not considered (at least not in the near-field). To conclude, these results are discussed in relation to aspects that have been identified as central to Modern2020, that is, a ‘contextual approach’ to monitoring programme development and the role of public participation. The latter will be the focus of further Modern2020 research. As it is largely conditioned by pre-existing notions and technologies in NWM this report has brought this to the fore; pointing out that waste management programmes are to a substantial degree ‘locked-in’ which limits the degree to which relatively recent views and developments regarding underground repository monitoring may permeate them. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Brussels
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EC-EURATOM
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2018
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Volume/pages
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66 p.
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Full text (open access)
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