The Siting of Swedish Nuclear Waste: An Example of Deliberative Democracy?

This paper is about the siting process of high-level nuclear waste (HLNW), focusing on consultations with organisations as part of the environmental impact assessment (EIA). In 1992, SKB started its search for a site (deep bedrock) for the HLNW. Today, site investigations are being carried out in Oskarshamn and Oesthammar, two municipalities that already host nuclear facilities. According to the Environmental Code, the exploiter (SKB) is required to hold consultations with individuals who might be specifically concerned about the intervention. Who should be seen as concerned is not clearly defined in the law, but people living near the planned facility and environmental organisations are mentioned. During the consultations, the facility's siting, extent, and design and its environmental impact, as well as the content and design of EIS should be covered. The EIA takes place alongside SKB's technical and geological investigations. To conclude, the aim of the EIA is to, through dialogue between concerned parties, ensure that the applicant has developed a satisfactory proposal where all relevant questions have been taken into account. The questions this paper seeks to answer are: How is the agenda for the consultations set? Which actor(s) are defined as speakers vs audience? What is the character of the discussions at the consultations? The paper focuses on three consultations, two with local organisations in Oskarshamn and Oesthammar, and one in Stockholm with national environmental organisations. These consultations are studied as separate events as well as a series of consultations. The analysis of the consultations show that the organiser of the meetings, SKB, is successful in drawing a boundary between themselves as lecturer and the rest of the participants as listeners, with one exception. At the final consultation in Oesthammar, the Opinion Group of Safe Final Repository (OSS), was allowed to hold a presentation. This is an example of an organisation gaining access to the agenda, and a request for participatory deliberative democracy. The permission to hold a presentation can be connected to criticism of the previous consultations in Oskarshamn and Stockholm. At these consultations, environmental organisations requested opportunities to set the agenda without success. These consultations can therefore mainly be seen as information arenas for SKB rather than arenas for deliberation. At all the consultations, different actors tried to place the deep holes method on an equal footing with the KBS 3-method without any success. There are also examples of how SKB tried to play down the alternative expert conclusions that organisations wanted to raise by saying that the organisations did not have enough knowledge to participate in the discussion on equal terms with SKB. This is an example of one actor showing a preference for a participatory deliberative democracy and another for a rational deliberative democracy. To conclude, the consultations are firstly important to study in order to get a picture of how actors try to draw boundaries about the decision of where to site the Swedish HLNW. The results of the paper are secondly of importance for further studies of the siting process of HLNW, as well as the EIA-process, because of the final conclusions as to which actor(s) that got support for their attempts to impact the decision, which actor(s) that had access to the discussions, and the character of the deliberations. Thirdly, the design of the EIA is an interesting example of a process that opens up for more participative deliberations in advance of important decisions than is usual in a representative democracy