Demonstration of the application of weighting factors for cost and radiological impact to waste management decisions

Radioactive waste management can require difficult decisions involving many complex and often competing factors. In order to make decisions, the relevant factors need to be compared with each other and balanced, so that the resulting action produces the greatest net benefit. Decision-aiding techniques may help to carry out this balancing. A public survey has been designed and analyzed, which focused on the importance of both social values and the psychological processes likely to contribute to their formation. A method has been developed by which the preferences of the public concerning the consequence of waste management options may be obtained in a form suitable for use in multi-attribute decision-aiding techniques. It appears that this method is capable of producing useful, meaningful values for these weights, and therefore represents a major improvement on previous methods of obtaining weighting factors