Safety in long term radioactive waste management: Insight and oversight

摘要: Abstract High-level, long-lived radioactive waste remains hazardous for periods that go well beyond our human conception of time (many thousands years). Because active safety measures are considered unreliable, unjustifiable and simply impossible over such long spans, experts worldwide recommend geological disposal as the preferred strategy long-term management, to a large extent due its promise delivering ‘passive safety’. Passive refers repository being safe ‘by itself’, i.e. unmediated by actors actions. Safety is thus approached technically delineated an intrinsic property system. As such, notion safety’ entails system simplification allows approaching in more calculable predictable manner than would be case ‘active In this article, we describe analyze ambiguity seemingly straightforward approach safety. Drawing on constructivist insights from science technology studies, propose integrated sociotechnical vision transcends versus passive division. The ‘oversight’, it currently starting surface international management discourses, will used sensitizing concept, offering potential elaborate vision.