Literacy in long-term governance of controversial sociotechnical environmental issues: An exploratory guide for Strategic Monitoring of radioactive waste, toxic waste, and carbon storage

Abstract

Deep geological repositories of nuclear waste, long-term landfills of special waste and the substantive storage of carbon dioxide to relieve the world’s climate from excessive system change are intricate and contentious policy fields with an impact of decades to hundreds of thousands of years. This work aims at exploring how society and technology can set up and implement sustainable ways – in the long run – to cope with the issues. They all are long-term safety issues and require long-term institutional involvement of the technoscientific community, waste producers, public administrators, NGOs and the public. The demonstration of long-term safety is challenging and monitoring may contribute to substantiate evidence, support decision making and legitimate the programme. What, where and when to monitor is determined by its goal setting: It may be operational, confirmatory (in the near field) or environmental (far field). As it is “difficult to make predictions, especially about the future” , this contribution, too, does not pretend to present the silver bullet, but Strategic Monitoring as proposed and developable contributes to process, implementation or policy and institutional surveillance to sustain a once launched programme. It does not only address the controversial long-lasting “problem” (of nuclear, toxic or CO2 waste) but investigates some ways to approach for “solutions” or solution spaces, not just technical but also institutional and personal, and this for the long term. It includes the tailored transfer of knowledge, concept and system understanding, experience and documentation to specific audiences above. It is an integrative tool of targeted yet adaptive management and may be applicable to other long-term sociotechnical fields.