Sociotechnical Systems Design for Consent-Based Siting of Nuclear Waste Facilities

Successfully executed radioactive waste management projects are critical to the sustainability of the nuclear industry. While there's a tendency to think the challenges to successfully manage radioactive waste are technical, public acceptance is perhaps the biggest challenge. The social aspects of nuclear waste storage, transportation and disposal cannot be understated, hence the growing emphasis on consent-based siting. While there are a number of examples of successful and unsuccessful consent-based siting efforts, there is no single "roadmap" or "framework" to describe how to secure community consent. We believe one such potential roadmap or framework could be Sociotechnical Systems Design. Sociotechnical Systems Design recognizes the interaction between people and technology and considers both social and technical factors that influence the functionality, practicability, acceptability, and usage of a system. A holistic analysis of any system considers five work system elements (people, technology/tools, tasks, policies/organization, and the environment) and identifies where requirements or conditions of these elements have consequences triggering changes on the others. Concurrent Engineering is a systematic approach to enable designers to consider all system elements and their interfaces throughout the lifecycle from the outset by incorporating stakeholders early in the pre-design stages. This paper describes how a radioactive waste management project could be implemented as a sociotechnical system that relies on a concurrent engineering process to achieve consent-based siting of a nuclear waste management facility. The resulting framework addresses the socio-economic requirements of communities while facilitating communication and interaction opportunities between technical, political, and social stakeholders. This will allow communities to access information and raise concerns about waste management locally, while letting technical specialists factor these concerns into the waste management program design, providing information where needed, and reducing the need for rework and retrofitting. Staged implementation of sociotechnical systems design supported by concurrent engineering can be key to consent-based siting and a successful waste management program. (author)