Nuclear waste and social planning - in the need of sustainable political legitimacy

The proposition in this paper is that handling nuclear waste in an efficient, democratic and legitimate way presupposes a thorough reflection on the limits and possibilities of social planning and legitimacy, and a deliberate extension of the meaning of these concepts. The central point consists in an analysis of the concept political legitimacy. When the concept was established in the period after 1799, it had meanings of both legality and morality. A legitimate solution could be justified either in terms of (national) law or specified norms. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legitimacy dealt mainly with the issues of legal foundations and moral justification based in institutions and discourses. This conception of legitimacy is inadequate when applied to the issue of nuclear waste as a social phenomenon. The time aspect is much longer than the period we reasonably can make predictions regarding the design of social institutions. How can we make guarantees that will endure for a period of time that is so long that we cannot possibly say anything about the very existence of human societies, and far less make predictions about the stability of social institutions 100,000 years into the future? Likewise, the comparatively short time period of implementation, during which the planned nuclear waste repositories are to be built and finally shut tight, is far more extended than any other societal project. When neither the ideological, nor the institutional and technological stability are possible to secure, the main question will be: Who/what grants legitimacy to the societal handling of nuclear waste? We tentatively maintain that the social handling of nuclear waste demands that social planning and legitimacy be linked with a clear and distinct assumption of responsibility. It must be a geographically and temporally universalistic assumption of responsibility. In addition, the management of nuclear waste in a sustainable and legitimate manner requires both a firm foundation of justification in the contemporary societal context, as well as robust and institutionalised political processes which continuously foster legitimacy in the future