The middle ground for nuclear waste management: Social and ethical aspects of shallow storage

The 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA and the 2011 seismic events in Japan have brought into sharp relief the vulnerabilities involved in storing nuclear waste on the land's surface. Nuclear engineers and waste managers are deciding that disposing nuclear waste deep underground is the preferred management option. However, deep disposal of nuclear waste is replete with enormous technical uncertainties. A proposed solution to protect against both the technical vagaries of deep disposal and the dangers of surface events is to store the nuclear waste at shallow depths underground. This paper explores social and ethical issues that are relevant to such shallow storage, including security motivations, intergenerational equity, nuclear stigma, and community acceptance. One of the main ethical questions to emerge is whether it is right for the present generation to burden local communities and future generations with these problems since neither local peoples nor future people have sanctioned the industrial and military processes that have produced the waste in the first place.