[en] Public acceptability has been the rock on which radioactive waste management plans have foundered in many countries. As a response to this, public consultation, information provision, and transparency have been recognised as necessary elements for successful development and implementation of management plans. However, the actual practice of public consultation, in many cases, fails to adequately incorporate the significance of questioning the ways in which the problem is defined, the issues that are important, and the overall 'framing' of the problem. Public framing generally differs substantially from the way in which the problem is understood by those institutions responsible for its management; further, there are differences in the ways in which different publics frame issues. These public differences may or may not be attributable to demographic factors, but are closely related to the problem context - that is, the history of relationships, structural conditions, and the cultural resources available to make sense of the issues. The author argues that it is crucial that public framing(s) are adequately taken into account in developing management initiatives, so that policies reflect these different understandings, and thus have more social purchase, in line with Grove-White and Wynne's argument that in order for radioactive waste management to become a solvable problem, it is necessary to generate social ownership of the problem. However, traditional, and even many novel, consultation processes do not comprehensively address the issue of framing, but reproduce assumptions about the nature of the problem and how it should be addressed. These assumptions are present in, for example, the institutional arrangements and scientific and technical agendas. The author reports on a project undertaken this year with Nirex entitled 'The Front of the Front End' which used repeat focus groups to directly elicit the ways in which different publics frame the issue of radioactive waste in the current context of UK society. The author presents the method as a useful, practical and cost effective way of addressing questions of framing, and goes on to argue that not only is this essential as a first stage of developing policies, but that framing needs to be re-assessed over time to enable changes to be mapped and incorporated into policy. The results of the study show clearly the use the general public make of their particular cultural resources in arguing towards a position on what the issues are and how they should be managed, including multiple references to other issues which are seen as similar or having similar components. The study also showed a considerable degree of congruence between different groups, providing a valuable starting point for the re-evaluation of UK radioactive waste management policy. The findings are related to other contemporary studies in the UK, which generally support the overall findings. A problem is identified, however, in that responsible institutions, with their existing practices of understanding the nature of the problem, can find it difficult to integrate the both the concept of framing and the alternatives understandings of the problem which are articulated through ration