Decision making for complex socio-technical systems: Robustness from lessons learned in long-term radioactive waste governance

Citation

(2006), "Decision making for complex socio-technical systems: Robustness from lessons learned in long-term radioactive waste governance", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 17 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/meq.2006.08317cae.001

Decision making for complex socio-technical systems: Robustness from lessons learned in long-term radioactive waste governance

Decision making for complex socio-technical systems: Robustness from lessons learned in long-term radioactive waste governance

Thomas FlüelerSeries Environment & PolicyVol. 42Springer Verlag2006Dordrecht NLISBN: 1-4020-3480-6p. 357€125,00

The long-term governance of radioactive waste continues to be a major complex and contentious socio-technical issue worldwide. Traditionally, it has been considered as mainly a challenge to scientists and engineers to develop technical “solutions” to specific problems. But increasingly these narrow solutions have been enlarged by wider societal considerations such as ethics, public involvement, control and retrievability – needs that have in the meanwhile been recognised by the nuclear community, at least in a general way.

In this book, the motives for a broad discourse as well as suggest prerequisites to launch it are analysed. The author attempts to give a novel, empirically based and technically sound treatment of fundamental issues in long-term management and governance. Written to be accessible to a wide selection of the interested public, the study proposes a combination of technical design issues, analysis methods and institutional backup in a dynamic procedure, and with involvement at all levels of political, commercial and social life.