New thinking imperative in a multinational partnership: towards the strengthening of the nuclear industry back-end

An efficient way to increase safety and security in the use of nuclear energy nowadays is to develop multinational radioactive waste (RW) and spent fuel repositories - the nuclear industry back-end. The problem of multilevel consensus building for siting and construction of shared multinational/regional repositories for RW deep disposal is considered. We propose an interdisciplinary synergetic approach to multilevel consensus building for siting and construction of shared multinational repositories for RW deep disposal, based on self-organization (SO) of various stakeholders, chaos and fuzziness concepts as well as the principle of requisite variety. An entire partnering country is considered as a higher-level stakeholder - the national stakeholder, represented by the national government, being faced to simultaneous seeking an upward (international) and a downward (intra-national) consensus in a psychologically stressed environment, possibly being characterized by diverse political, economic and social interests. There is deduced: a) building of international stakeholder consensus would be promoted by activating on the international scale multilateral interactions between intra- and international stakeholders, including web-based networks of disposal site investigations and decision-making, as well as networks for international cooperation among government authorities in nuclear safety, b) gradual progress in intergovernmental consensus and reaching multilateral agreements on shared deep repositories will be the result of dialogue, via observing the whole set of various interests and common resolving of emerged controversies by using advanced synergetic approaches of conflict resolution, and c) knowledge, mental flexibility and creativity are considered as basic prerogatives for gaining a higher level of mutual understanding and consensus, for advancing the preparedness to act together and achieving desired shared goals. It is proposed: self-organized social learning will promote adequate perception of risk and prevent, by diminishing uncertainties and unknown factors, social amplification of an imagined risk, as well as to increase the trust level and facilitate more adequate equity perception. (Author)