Improving societal acceptance of radwaste management policy decisions - An approach based on complex intelligence

In today's context elaborate public participation exercises are conducted around the world to elicit and incorporate societal risk perceptions into nuclear policy Decision-Making. However, on many occasions, such as in the case of radwaste management, the society remains unconvinced about these decisions. This naturally leads to the questions: are techniques for incorporating societal risk perceptions into the radwaste policy decision making processes sufficiently mature? How could societal risk perceptions and legal normative principles be better integrated in order to render the decisions more equitable and convincing to society? Based on guidance from socio-psychological research this paper postulates that a critical factor for gaining/improving societal acceptance is the quality and adequacy of criteria for option evaluation that are used in the policy decision making. After surveying three radwaste public participation cases, the paper identifies key lacunae in criteria abstraction processes as currently practiced. A new policy decision support model CIRDA: Complex Intelligent Risk Discourse Abstraction model that is based on the heuristic of Risk-Risk Analysis is proposed to overcome these lacunae. CIRDA's functionality of radwaste policy decision making is modelled as a policy decision-making Abstract Intelligent Agent and the agent program/abstraction mappings are presented. CIRDA is then applied to a live (U.K.) radwaste management case and the advantages of this method as compared to the Value Tree Method as practiced in the UK case are demonstrated. (author)