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Journal of Risk Research
ISSN: 1366-9877 (Print) 1466-4461 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjrr20
How (not) to talk about the uncertain: siting
geological disposal for highly radioactive waste in
the Czech Republic
Karel Svačina
To cite this article: Karel Svačina (2017) How (not) to talk about the uncertain: siting geological
disposal for highly radioactive waste in the Czech Republic, Journal of Risk Research, 20:9,
1211-1225, DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2015.1121901
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2015.1121901
Published online: 08 Jan 2016.
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How (not) to talk about the uncertain: siting geological disposal
for highly radioactive waste in the Czech Republic
Karel Svačina*
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech
Republic
(Received 24 August 2014; final version received 9 November 2015)
There is an ongoing controversy in the Czech Republic over where to site a deep
geological repository for the country’s radioactive waste. Recently, the
negotiations between municipalities and state authorities responsible for
radioactive waste management experienced a sharp turn: after several years of
dialogue guaranteed by the promise of the state authorities not to start site investigations
at preselected sites without the consent of affected municipalities, the
state authorities suddenly decided not to keep this promise, and to start site
investigations without the municipalities’ consent, saying that time for dialogue
will come after the site investigations will have been completed. This article
explores the period of the failed dialogue with respect to how risks and uncertainties
were treated in the negotiations. Drawing on two strands of scholarship
on risk and uncertainty, the risk governance school and the STS perspectives on
sociotechnical controversies, two paradigms for dealing with risk and uncertainty
are outlined. These are used as a framework to analyse how implementers and
local stakeholders articulated possible risk or uncertainty issues in negotiations
about the Czech geological disposal between 2009 and 2013. The analysis shows
that whereas the implementers adopt (sometimes even an extreme version of)
the risk-based paradigm, the positions of the local stakeholders seem to be
mixed. These observations lead to two conclusions: first, at the theoretical level,
perhaps some of the STS literature was too quick to assume that people ‘want’
uncertainty. Second, at the practical level, it is suggested that in the light of the
failed dialogue, it might be worth for the implementers to take a lesson from the
uncertainty-based paradigm, and consider the possibility that perhaps still more
work needs to be done in order to turn uncertainty into risk.
Keywords: siting; geological disposal; radioactive waste; uncertainty; risk;
Czech Republic
Introduction
Siting geological disposal for high-level radioactive waste is a complex and intricate
issue. Many countries have chosen the construction of deep geological disposal as
their final and permanent solution to the problem of high-level radioactive waste,
but the proposal to build the repository often turned into an enduring controversy
over where to do so (cf. e.g. Jacob 1990; Flynn et al. 1995; Sundqvist 2002).
*Email: kajasvacina@gmail.com
© 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Journal of Risk Research, 2017
Vol. 20, No. 9, 1211–1225, https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2015.1121901
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The Czech Republic is no exception in this respect. The efforts to find a site for the
country’s highly radioactive waste date back to the 1990s, and have experienced
several twists and turns since then. The last one took place in 2013, when state
authorities suddenly decided to proceed with geological site investigations against
the consent of the concerned municipalities, despite the fact that for the past several
years they had been emphasising the need for dialogue, and they were promising the
municipalities not to start the investigations without their approval.
The period of dialogue that preceded this turn can be seen as a failure, both from
the implementers’1
as well as the local stakeholders’ view. Whereas the implementers
argued that the reason for the twist in their strategy was that the dialogue
did not bring progress they had expected, local stakeholders were left feeling
deceived and betrayed by having been given promises that suddenly vanished into
thin air (Konopásek and Svačina 2014). This article aims to investigate one circumstance
that possibly contributed to this failure – the way risks and uncertainties were
treated during the ‘dialogue’ period of ‘the’ Czech controversy.
There are many unresolved issues in the project of geological disposal. There are
scientific controversies related to the safety case of the repository (Kärnavfallsrådet
2011; Szakálos and Seetharaman 2012). Local stakeholders often express concerns
about nature protection, future availability of drinking water, or the development of
the local real estate market. These issues are numerous, and as implementers strive
to proceed with the disposal project, they need to be dealt with somehow. This article
is concerned with how this is done in the Czech case.
In risk literature, the concepts of risk and uncertainty are often discussed together
(e.g. Beck 1992; Renn 2008; van Asselt and Renn 2011). However, their relationship
has been subject to a long debate. In this respect, de Vries, Verhoeven, and
Boeckhout (2011) have recently argued for a new approach in risk governance, one
that stems from a constructivist reconsideration of the relationship between risk and
uncertainty. Following their argument, two paradigms for risk governance can be
identified, a ‘risk-based’ one, and an ‘uncertainty-based’ one. In this article, these
two paradigms are going to serve as the framework for analysis of the Czech debate
on geological disposal. The goal here is not to say whether an issue is a case of risk
or uncertainty; nor is it to say which of the two paradigms is better. The goal is to
see how, during the ‘dialogue’ period which took place roughly between 2009 and
2013, risk or uncertainty issues were treated by different actors in different situations,
particularly whether they were treated in the spirit of the risk-based, or of the
uncertainty-based paradigm. Because the differences in the assumptions of the two
paradigms are quite fundamental, such analysis may provide a new insight into the
failed Czech dialogue.
A first-hand explanation of the controversy in the analytical framework proposed
here would be that local stakeholders incline towards the ‘uncertainty-based’ paradigm,
while implementers incline towards the ‘risk-based’ paradigm. Such explanation
is suggested in some literature on risk, uncertainty and sociotechnical
controversies (e.g. Wynne 2002; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009), and initial
observations of the Czech case would also support it. However, a closer examination
shows that in the Czech controversy this is not exactly the case. In this respect, the
article also aims to contribute to the debate on the relationship between risk and
uncertainty and on the nature of sociotechnical controversies.
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A risk-based and an uncertainty-based paradigm in understanding
sociotechnical controversies
The conceptual framework employed in this article draws on two lines of
scholarship on risk and uncertainty. One comes from the risk governance tradition
(e.g. Klinke and Renn 2002, 2012; IRGC 2005; van Asselt and Renn 2011), the
other comes from constructivist perspectives on risk and uncertainty in science and
technology studies (Wynne 1992, 2002; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009).
Although in many ways different, these two bodies of scholarly work share some
key academic and practical concerns, above all, how to understand and deal with
techno-scientific issues in conditions of uncertainty (cf. van Asselt 2005). This section
will introduce the concepts of risk and uncertainty with respect to these two
lines of thinking, and in relation to the geological disposal controversy. The aim to
find common ground for the delineation of risk and uncertainty, but also to point out
some differences between the two perspectives, in order to be able to arrive at the
distinction between the ‘risk-based’ and ‘uncertainty-based’ paradigms for risk
governance.
The concept of risk is commonly used to refer to a possibility of harmful outcome
or damage (van Asselt and Renn 2011; 437). In the geological disposal case, this
could be for instance a possibility of environmental damage due to the construction
of the repository, or the possibility that property prices will fall dramatically in the
affected municipalities. Uncertainty is somewhat more difficult to define in general.
It has been referred to as a situation where there is ‘lack of knowledge’ (de Vries,
Verhoeven, and Boeckhout 2011, 489). But it has also been argued that ‘uncertainty
does not necessarily precede knowledge, but it may originate from it’ (van Asselt
2005, 132) – more knowledge does not necessarily mean less uncertainty. Therefore,
instead of linking uncertainty with lack of knowledge, one can say that in general,
uncertainty refers to the limited possibilities or abilities to predict the outcome of a
situation or activity.2
Of course, uncertainty in a general meaning is a condition of
human life; however, the specificity of uncertainty in the context of sociotechnical
controversies is that here, science and expertise meets lay people’s knowledge in
decision-making processes where a lot is at stake, many outcomes are impossible to
predict, and there is a usually a ‘desire or incentive to act’ (131).
Scholars in risk governance and in science studies have approached the relationship
between risk and uncertainty in fundamentally different ways. The risk governance
tradition has developed distinctions between different types of risk, in
particular ‘simple’, ‘complex’, ‘uncertain’ and ‘ambiguous’ risks, arguing that each
category necessitates a different management strategy (IRGC 2005, 44–48; Renn
2008, 177–184). In this sense, the risk governance tradition has significantly broadened
the notion of risk from ‘traditional risk–risk comparisons (or risk–risk tradeoffs)’
(Renn 2008, 178). In doing so, risk governance has contained the notion of
uncertainty within the notion of risk, to the extent that some risk governance scholars
deem the adjective ‘uncertain’ in ‘uncertain risks’ superfluous, and prefer to drop
it altogether (Aven and Renn 2009, 2; Rosa 2003 cited in van Asselt and Renn
2011, 444). In contrast, some scholars in science studies have argued that the notion
of risk comes historically from the vocabulary of engineers, economists, and insurers,
in whose trade risk was always something that could be calculated, and it should
remain to be used in this way (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). For these
scholars, risk is when we know the inventory of possible states of the world, or
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scenarios, as well as their probability distributions (19–20), or in other words when
we ‘know the odds’ (Wynne 1992, 114). As a result, science studies scholars have
insisted on the strict analytical separation of risk from uncertainty, and they have
gone to focus on developing the latter notion.
On the one hand, these two lines of thought are not that much different. Where
science studies scholars make a distinction between risk and uncertainty, risk governance
scholars make a distinction between simple risks and uncertain, complex, and/
or ambiguous risks. In both cases, the emphasis is on the latter group, saying that
the former group is a special case, and in both cases it is argued that issues are too
often treated as if they belonged to the first group (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe
2009, 228; van Asselt and Renn 2011, 438). In this sense, to insist on the difference
between these two lines of thought may be seen as splitting hairs, a mere vocabulary
issue. However, at closer look the difference between these two lines of thinking is
more fundamental, to the extent that we can speak of two paradigms for understanding
risk and uncertainty in sociotechnical controversies. The difference was recently
highlighted in a report by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy
Uncertain Safety (WRR 2009), and its more condensed version in de Vries, Verhoeven,
and Boeckhout (2011). Taking a constructivist perspective common in science
studies, the authors of these reports argue that risk is already a result of heterogeneous
work and effort done by different actors, and attention needs to be paid to
how risk is constructed.3
That is why, according to them, ‘analytically uncertainty
deserves pride of place over risk: risks may emerge out of uncertainties, not the
other way around, and they will do so only after considerable efforts have been
undertaken.’ (491)4
Giving analytical pride of place to uncertainty over risk has practical implications
for dealing with sociotechnical controversies. De Vries, Verhoeven, and
Boeckhout argue that today, policy-makers often face issues that do not fit, or may
move between the categories developed in the risk governance tradition. Therefore,
it is too often misleading to settle for one category of risk for a given problem
(487–489). To be able to deal with such issues, they call for a broader, uncertaintybased
approach to risk governance, as a ‘society’s framework for taming (safety
issues related) uncertainty,’ whose purpose is ‘to organize the efforts needed to
translate uncertainty as far as possible into risk.’ (491) Therefore, if we follow the
argument of the WRR (2009) and de Vries, Verhoeven, and Boeckhout (2011), we
arrive at two paradigms for dealing with sociotechnical controversies, which stem
from the two lines of thinking presented above: a risk-based, and an uncertaintybased
paradigm.
This paper aims to analyse the Czech geological disposal controversy in terms of
these two paradigms. But in order to use the two paradigms as a theoretical framework,
some more work needs to be done. At the theoretical level, it is easy to make
a distinction between the two paradigms (‘giving analytical pride of place to risk or
uncertainty’), but how does this difference translate into practice? The parties in the
controversy will not explicitly endorse one of the paradigms or the other, nor is it
possible to say that if someone talks about ‘risk’, then that person prefers the
risk-based paradigm, or when someone talks about ‘uncertainty’, then that person
prefers the uncertainty-based paradigm. So what are some of the preferences or characteristics
within these paradigms that account for the difference between them?
The risk-based paradigm prefers the idea of risk over the idea of uncertainty. The
notion of risk is historically linked with the effort to calculate its probability. In case
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of complex, uncertain and ambiguous risks in risk governance, there is a consistent
effort at the ability to control and manage these phenomena. Risks are categorised,
different evaluation, management and communication strategies are advised (Klinke
and Renn 2002, 2012), scenarios are sketched out. Dealing with risks is delegated to
experts: in some cases, public involvement is increasingly being advised, but it usually
pertains only to certain phases of the risk management process, and its organisation
is in the hands of risk governance experts. Scientific risk assessment belongs to
different stages than public involvement. Dealing with risks may also include calculating
the costs of the damage, and compensating for this damage (IRGC 2005).
In the uncertainty-based paradigm, on the other hand, the idea of uncertainty is
preferred. Risk becomes a special case. This paradigm asserts that it is often difficult
or impossible to outline specific management strategies or the inventory of possible
scenarios in advance. Instead, emphasis is put on ‘proactive approach to uncertainty’
(de Vries, Verhoeven, and Boeckhout 2011, 493). Uncertainties are put centre stage,
and the goal is to explore them. This is a collective and progressive effort (Latour
2004; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). In this sense, the separation between
expert and lay people’s knowledge is in some cases blurred. In terms of ‘risk
management’, it means a shift of focus from damage to vulnerabilities (de Vries,
Verhoeven, and Boeckhout 2011), and there is a wider emphasis on precaution
(Wynne 1992).
These two lists delineate the two paradigms perhaps quite crudely, but the aim is
to draw two distinct positions that will serve as the framework for analysis, to which
we shall turn after a brief introduction to the Czech geological disposal controversy.
Looking for a site for geological disposal in the Czech Republic
The Czech geological disposal programme dates back to the early 1990s, when the
Czech Geological Survey identified 27 areas across the Czech Republic as potentially
suitable for geological disposal. This selection was based on existing geological
data (Krajíček et al. 2006, 17). The 27 areas were further assessed by the
Nuclear Research Institute, which resulted into a preliminary selection of 8 locations
within 5 of the 27 areas. In 1997, the Radioactive Waste Repository Authority
(SÚRAO) was established. In 2001, the government approved a document called
‘Strategy for the management of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel’ (MPO
ČR 2001). This document states that the preferred solution for long-term management
of highly radioactive wastes in the Czech Republic is deep geological disposal
in granitic environment (15). The document also outlines a schedule for the geological
disposal project. This schedule states that by 2015 two sites ‘with the best geological
conditions and in accordance with the expected regional development’ are to
be identified. By 2025, one of these localities is to be confirmed as the final one; by
2030 the construction of an underground laboratory is to be started, and the repository
is supposed to start operation in 2065 (22).5
The plan to construct a geological disposal facility became a public issue in the
early 2000s, when a number of municipalities learned from the media that they were
being considered as potential sites for geological disposal.6
A wave of local protests
followed, culminating with a demonstration in front of the governmental offices in
Prague. NGOs engaged in nuclear waste and energy issues helped the municipalities
organise local referenda, in which large majorities of people voted against the
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prospect of the repository. Partly in response to these developments, in 2004 the
minister of industry and trade declared a five-year moratorium on the siting process.
After the moratorium ended in 2009, negotiations resumed. The list of preselected
sites remained more or less the same, but the shape of the negotiations changed
significantly. Rather than talking about the repository, the implementers started
emphasising the need to carry out site investigations. Much emphasis was being put
on dialogue; a national ‘Working group for dialogue about geological disposal’ was
established, which brought together municipal and NGO representatives from all the
concerned sites as well as representatives of SÚRAO and other state institutions.
Between 2009 and 2012 SÚRAO also organised a number of public debates at the
concerned sites. Perhaps most importantly, SÚRAO was in this time period repeatedly
declaring that the site investigations would not start without the consent of the
concerned municipalities, and that the consent with site investigations would not
imply consent with the repository.7
In 2012, SÚRAO proposed to sign contracts, in which municipalities would
express their consent with the site investigations. Several municipalities at two sites
were about to sign these contracts, however, strong local opposition at these sites
broke out again, and in the end the municipalities refrained from signing the contracts.
What followed was a sharp turn in the implementers’ approach. In early
2013, SÚRAO representatives declared that the strategy based on obtaining first the
consent with site investigations was not feasible, and that they would first carry out
the site investigations, and then discuss the siting problem with the concerned
municipalities.8
In other words, the siting strategy based on dialogue failed, and the
implementers turned (back) towards a more ‘technocratic’ decision-making. The
municipal and NGO representatives were left with a bitter feeling of having been
deceived.9
Understanding the failed dialogue through the two paradigms
The failure of the dialogue at the end of 2012 can be attributed to a mixture of different
reasons (Konopásek and Svačina 2014). The aim of this paper is to investigate
one ingredient of this mixture – the way risks and uncertainties were treated in the
negotiations. To do so, this section will follow the implementers and local stakeholders
across several different settings. The aim is to see whether and how the two
groups articulate issues of risk and uncertainty, how they relate to them, and what
strategies they use or advise in dealing with them, especially in relation to the riskbased
and uncertainty-based paradigms.
This research strategy is simplifying at least in two respects. First, the selection
of the particular situations and data cannot claim to be representative in the sense
that they would reveal the actors’ positions in their complexity. The data were collected
mostly by the author between 2011 and 2014 as a part of the InSOTEC project,
and consists of qualitative research interviews with key actors in the
controversy, observations from meetings and public debates, technical reports, policy
documents and media articles. The particular excerpts selected in this article are
obviously only brief glimpses at the long and complex negotiation process. Nevertheless,
the present selection of data is based on the author’s several years long
experience following the controversy, and the author believes that it represents behaviour
and positions that were typical for the parties involved in the controversy during
the dialogue period. Second, the two groups of stakeholders outlined here are far
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from homogeneous; especially vis-a-vis local stakeholders, every site has its specific
conditions and concerns. Moreover, at each site there are municipal representatives,
farmers, industrial workers, holidaymakers and NGOs, all of whom may have different
interests, and all of whom will be conflated together here into one category. Nevertheless,
it is believed that such simplifying research strategy is legitimate and
potentially fruitful here, as it may help understand the prevailing positions in the
controversy.10
Implementers
At a public meeting in a village called Věžná in April 2012, SÚRAO’s director of
the geological disposal programme was presenting the Czech repository project.11
He identified ‘three pillars’ of constructing a safe repository. The first pillar was
called ‘How?’, and it was concerned with the technical solution. The director talked
about the natural and engineered barriers; he reiterated that there is an international
consensus on this concept, and that such design is a result of ‘generally accepted
solutions that the scientific community has agreed upon in the past’ (Public meeting
in Věžná, 12 April 2012). The second pillar was called ‘Who pays?’ Here, the director
pointed out the Czech ‘nuclear fund,’12
and concluded that ‘the Czech Republic
is clearly one of the countries that have established a financial system that is able to
cover the costs of the future geological disposal.’ (Ibid.) The third pillar was called
‘Where?’ On the slide, it was followed by an inscription in red capitals: ‘SITE!!!’
The director introduced it as follows: ‘The third pillar is, however, ‘where’. That is
the question of the locality and one can say that it is one of the key problems which
each country has to face when constructing geological disposal.’ (Ibid.) The director
went on to explain that the site will need to be chosen on the basis of geological
investigations, which ‘will be carried out in a relatively simple manner …’ (Ibid.)
And how will the final selection be made? ‘The fundamental criterion is naturally
the safety of the future repository, but naturally … it is also important how much it
will cost, and what the activity – the construction of the repository and its operation
– may bring to the region.’ (Ibid.) Finally, it was emphasised that it is important for
SÚRAO to choose the final site in a way that in the long term will be acceptable for
the concerned municipalities as well as for the public.
How is risk or uncertainty treated here? First of all, neither risk nor uncertainty
is explicitly mentioned. The issue of geological disposal is divided into three distinct
questions (‘How’, ‘Who pays’, ‘Where’), which are to be dealt with separately. The
first question is regarded as a matter of scientific and technical expertise upon which
there is an established scientific consensus. The second one is a matter of legal
arrangement that is already in place. They are both ‘technical’, and importantly, neither
of them poses any major problems. They are delegated to science and expertise.
The third question, ‘Where’, is further separated into two. There is again a ‘technical’
part (geological research needs to be done), which is not seen as a problem:
geological research will be ‘relatively simple’. But then there is a ‘social’ part (consent
of the municipalities needs to be obtained). This is seen as the main problem.
SÚRAO needs to make the selection in a way that people ‘will not protest in front
of the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic’ (Ibid.). There is an implied
uncertainty as to what the attitude of the municipalities will be.
Konopásek and Svačina (2014) describe how SÚRAO emphasised the need for
dialogue between 2009 and 2013, and how ultimately, this dialogue was translated
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into the quest for the municipalities’ consent with the site investigations. They note
a number of gradual changes that indicated the re-making of the organisation
towards a more active relationship with the public and local stakeholders (13–21).
Here it is important to note that SÚRAO framed all activities under these changes as
‘communication’ or ‘public relations’ activities.13
This framing can be seen being
closer to the risk-based paradigm than the uncertainty-based paradigm. It perpetuates
the separation of the geological disposal issue into technical parts and social parts.
While the technical parts are delegated purely to technical experts, social parts are
delegated to PR professionals. Furthermore, the PR-founded activities tend to present
the geological disposal project as a ready-made solution, which ‘only’ needs to
find its place, and whose purpose needs to be communicated well to the local stakeholders
(this logic was apparent also in the presentation discussed above). In other
words, possible uncertainties in the project itself are in practice left out of the public
debate. At the same time, the contracts that SÚRAO proposed to sign with the
municipalities would in effect ‘contain’ the uncertainty about what municipalities
would do, while providing room for SÚRAO to work on the (technical) site investigations.
In short, these practices of issue and knowledge separation, delegation,
uncertainty containment and secluded research resemble the risk-based paradigm
much more than the uncertainty-based paradigm.
Let us now have a look at some other sources of data – key technical documents.
In 1999, a ‘Reference Project’ was created (EGP Invest 1999). It is a technical project
of the repository at a hypothetical location, and it also includes the EIA report
(Lietava et al. 1999).14
The EIA report provides a framework for risk analysis of the
impact of the future repository to human health and the environment. It weighs different
scenarios and assesses different models of possible impacts. In this respect, it
points out uncertainties related to input data and to the models of behaviour of the
disposal system (Lietava et al. 1999, 38). Possibilities of dealing with these uncertainties
in safety assessments are then discussed, and calculation using parameters
from the hypothetical site is presented. The EIA report emphasises that due to the
hypothetical nature of the site, the conceptual and mathematical models and calculations
should be seen as an illustration, and should not be considered relevant for the
next steps in geological disposal development (Lietava et al. 1999, 43, 51). However,
despite this warning, the summary report of the Reference Project concludes
that ‘the disposal system does not endanger the health of the future generation or the
environment. Technological procedures ensure permanent isolation from the environment.
Technical solution eliminates all risks (radiation, toxic, or heat related).’ (EGP
Invest 1999, 39)
A more recent update of the Reference Project (Pospíšková et al. 2012) shows
similar argumentation. After discussing uncertainties due to the unavailability of
input data, and due to the fact that the engineered barriers have not been specified
yet (92), the report concludes:
Nevertheless, these calculations have clearly demonstrated that the disposal of radioactive
waste into a deep repository based on the updated Reference Project is safe and
cannot endanger human health or the environment, provided that over the next several
decades that remain before the assumed start of the operation of the repository (2065),
it will be proven and demonstrated that all the engineered and natural barriers will
fulfil their safety roles as expected. (Ibid.)
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What kind of work with risk or uncertainty is at play in these documents? The EIA
report of the Reference Project articulates uncertainty which consists largely in the
hypothetical stage of the project. Subsequently, this uncertainty in both the original
and the updated Reference Projects disappears. The Reference Project (Lietava et al.
1999) reduces it to a definite set of risks, and states that these are all eliminated by
technological procedures and technical solution. What we see here at work is again
delegation, this time to technical solutions and procedures (no matter that these have
not been devised yet).15
Similarly in the updated Reference Project (Pospíšková
et al. 2012), the impossibility to discuss uncertainty due to the fact that its existence
is uncertain, serves as grounds for not considering it further. As a result, if we
rephrase the concluding statement quoted above, it says: ‘it has been clearly demonstrated
that our disposal project is safe, provided that it will be proven and demonstrated
in the future that the repository is safe as we expect it to be.’ This statement
says that at the moment we can say nothing about the safety of the repository, but
the starting point is that it is absolutely safe.16
On the one hand, one can argue that these documents are supposed to serve
‘just’ as a reference, or a starting point of the project of the future geological disposal
facility at a hypothetical location, and therefore hypothetically and as a reference
it is legitimate to state that the project is safe. On the other hand, the
uncertainty-based paradigm emphasises precisely the opposite: the ‘proactive search
for uncertainty’ and the focus on vulnerabilities.
To conclude this section, the presented examples showed the implementers’
approach to dealing with risk or uncertainty as mainly that of separating the issue of
geological disposal, and delegating different parts to different groups of experts or
procedures. Uncertainty has been hardly articulated, and in the few cases where it
was, it was subsequently replaced by a reference to a limited set of risks, despite (or
perhaps due to) the acknowledgement that there was in fact uncertainty about the
uncertainty. Accordingly, no practices that would suggest proactive search for uncertainty,
collective exploration of uncertainty, or focus on vulnerabilities were found.17
In this sense, we can conclude that in handling possible risk or uncertainty issues,
the implementers of the Czech geological disposal project incline towards the riskbased
paradigm (or perhaps even a caricature of it).
Local stakeholders
This section will present several examples of how during the ‘dialogue period’ local
stakeholders articulated possible risk or uncertainty issues in response to, or in confrontation
with, the claims of the implementers. First, the presentation in Věžná was
followed by a discussion with local inhabitants. One of the questions raised concerned
SÚRAO’s internal quality control to prevent environmental damage during
the repository construction:
I am interested in what kind of internal regulations you have, or how you want to proceed
… to ensure the quality of the safety. I assume that the disposal itself will be of
course closely observed. What I am more interested in is, when all this is going to be
built, it obviously means environmental burden … how is this going to be done so that
it is safe? What control mechanisms do you have? (Public meeting in Věžná, 12 April
2012)
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The SÚRAO representative responded in two parts. First, he argued that every
construction work needs to be approved by relevant authorities. In relation to this,
he emphasised that SÚRAO is a state organisation, and that itself should be the
highest possible guarantee.18
Second, he argued that it is a question of ‘all of us
who are sitting here now, and who will be around the project,’ to not let the environment
be damaged (Ibid.). How to understand this exchange? The question articulates
a risk of environmental pollution (the possibility that the environment will be damaged).
At the same time, it sees the environment as vulnerable in relation to the construction
works, and asks about precautionary mechanisms within SÚRAO – the
responsible organisation. Emphasis on vulnerability and preventive measures is in
line with the uncertainty-based paradigm. However, the answer shifts responsibility
from the implementing organisation elsewhere (to legislative framework and to ‘all
of us’), which can be seen as contradictory to the uncertainty-based paradigm (de
Vries, Verhoeven, and Boeckhout 2011, 493). In this sense, the question is raising
concerns that are in line with the uncertainty-based paradigm, whereas the answer
does not correspond to this paradigm.
Second, a citizen association at one of the preselected sites published several
leaflets in 2012. One of them features an article called ‘What we could expect …’
(Kantová 2012). It is a partly fictional scenario of the repository development. It
combines milestones from the governmental schedule with potential benefits associated
with the project, such as ‘construction of a sports hall financed by contributions
for site investigations’. It also includes a number of possible adverse effects. For
instance, it states that by 2018, twenty per cent of the local forest is ‘devastated by
new necessary access roads, concrete base, and a waste pond for the very deep
drills.’ By 2020, young people are leaving the area, and the property prices have fallen
dramatically. After 2030, due to the construction of an underground laboratory,
the water level in local wells falls dramatically, and the wells become unusable. The
article concludes: ‘This scenario may seem to you more catastrophic than a Steven
Spielberg movie, but no one has convinced me so far that it cannot happen.’ (Ibid.)
On the one hand, this scenario can surely be seen as a caricature of how the disposal
project and the construction works are presented by the implementers. On the other
hand, it can also be seen as an alternative scenario, one that questions the scenario
presented by the implementers, and one that adopts the strategy of proactive search
for uncertainties by including people’s concerns that have not been answered satisfactorily
by the implementers.
The leaflets also contain several articles written by a local geologist, which question
the proposed geological investigations. In one of them, the geologist argues that
up to one thousand metres deep drills into granite, which were included in the proposal,
have never been done in the Czech Republic before, and that such drills
would necessarily mean quite severe environmental burden for the area. It is further
pointed out that SÚRAO does not have the technical competence to carry out such
drills, and it is argued that SÚRAO representatives deliberately downplay the extent
and environmental impact of these drills (Svejkovský 2012a, 2012b).19
In these
examples, local stakeholders mobilise their own expertise, and directly challenge the
implementers’ claims that the site investigations will be ‘carried out in a relatively
simple manner’. Where the implementers are confident about technological procedures,
local stakeholders suggest lack of skills and previous experience, and in this
way they articulate uncertainty on the way towards the proposed technical solution.
The mobilisation of their own expertise and effort to engage it in the controversy
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can be seen as an attempt to create a ‘hybrid forum’ (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe
2009), one of the devices typical of the uncertainty-based paradigm.
Third, let us turn to an interview with a representative of a local citizen association
from another site. He argued that there are many risks related to the disposal
project, but people in the municipalities suffer from lack of information about the
risks, and therefore they cannot make their opinion about it. He argued that SÚRAO
does not invite people from ‘the other side’ to their debates:
They should also invite experts … I do not mean people who would say ‘do not build
it here’, or ‘it is wrong’. I mean people who would say, ‘there are some risks and we
see them such and such.’ I think it would be useful even for SÚRAO and for the people
… that they would finally hear that it is not only white and beautiful. That there
are also some black things, and they would have an opportunity to compare these.
(Research interview, 3 January 2013)
When asked what the risks according to him were, he continued:
Some of them are those that can easily be refuted in the sense that we can discuss them
for a long time. These are first and foremost, that young people will not stay in the
region. … Another risk is the project itself, controlled by the state – in other words, by
no one. For me, the state is not a partner. … And further, if you talk to [a national
NGO representative focusing on energy issues and nuclear waste], and similarly to the
State Office for Nuclear Safety, they confirm that SÚRAO does not deal with safety
risks. They do not talk about risks at all. (Ibid.)
How to understand this account in terms of the two paradigms? First, the interviewee
uses the word ‘risk’, not ‘uncertainty’. But what are the issues that he mentions?
One is whether or not young people will stay in the region – here he suggests
that despite a long discussion, the outcome is unpredictable. Next, he points to the
vague identity of the state as the guarantor of the project, which in his opinion is
not accountable. In short, in terms of the outline between risk and uncertainty
employed in this article, he is talking about instances of uncertainty rather than risk.
But does that mean that his approach fits the uncertainty-based paradigm? Not
clearly. Throughout the interview, he has repeatedly referred to experts who should
participate in the debates and present the ‘risks’ to the people. He asserted that the
implementers should know the risks, and if they do not know them, ‘then it is
wrong’ (Ibid.). Furthermore, when asked whether people should discuss also the
technical parameters of the repository and what the repository will ‘look like’, he
said that many people were ‘not very interested’ in these issues, and they are ‘not
able to perceive the technical parameters very much’. (Ibid.) In other words, the
interviewee also articulates a distinction between expert and lay knowledge, where
experts should ‘know the risks’ and communicate them to the people, so that they
can decide about their fate. Such perspective is closer to the risk-based paradigm
than to the uncertainty-based paradigm. Therefore, in sum, the position of this local
stakeholder could best be described as a mixed one, drawing on both of the two
paradigms.
To conclude this section, local stakeholders are a very heterogeneous group, and
it is difficult to make any general claims about them. This section presented several
examples in which people from the preselected municipalities relate to possible risk
or uncertainty issues. Based on the knowledge of the controversy, these examples
were selected as typical, although they certainly do not represent the whole scale of
different perspectives. According to these examples, people at the preselected sites
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often come close to the uncertainty-based paradigm in the sense that they articulate
concerns whose outcome is difficult not only to predict, but also categorise, or
advise specific management strategies for them. Vulnerability of the natural and
social environment seems to be pointed to. But at the same time, local stakeholders
in the examples sometimes assume a clear separation between expert and lay knowledge
with delegation of technical issues to experts, and they expect the experts to
provide clear answers on the technical issues, and show specific procedures and
knowledge to handle the issues. To put it bluntly, they are not really ‘interested in
the uncertainties’, but want to see that the experts can handle them. Such expectations
can be seen as closer to the risk-based paradigm. Therefore, in the case of local
stakeholders, rather than speaking either of risk-based or of uncertainty-based paradigm,
the examples show their approach as a mixture of claims and expectations
drawing on both of these paradigms.
Conclusions
The aim of this article was to contribute to understanding the recently failed dialogue
about the Czech geological disposal for highly radioactive waste. Drawing on
two strands of scholarship on risk and uncertainty, the risk governance school and
the STS perspectives on sociotechnical controversies, two paradigms for dealing
with risk and uncertainty were outlined. These were used as a framework to analyse
how implementers and local stakeholders articulated possible risk or uncertainty
issues in negotiations about the Czech geological disposal between 2009 and 2013.
The analysis by no means claims to be exhaustive. Only a few empirical examples
were presented and analysed. In addition, the diversity of the actors involved in
the controversy was crudely conflated into two groups. Nevertheless, these reductions
were based on the author’s detailed knowledge of the controversy from previous
research. The author believes that such research strategy is legitimate in the task
of offering a new contribution to explaining the controversy, which can be further
scrutinised, criticised and of course refuted.
The analysis showed that whereas the implementers adopt (sometimes even an
extreme version of) the risk-based paradigm, the positions of the local stakeholders
seem to be mixed, even within single utterances. The latter observation is contrary
to what some STS literature suggests – that local stakeholders prefer the notion of
uncertainty and the collective exploration of it. These observations lead to two conclusions:
first, at the theoretical level, perhaps some of the STS literature was too
quick to assume that people ‘want’ uncertainty. The present examples suggest that
people want certainty, and that they set out to explore uncertainty primarily when
they feel that experts have not done their work properly. Second, at the practical
level, it is of course a question to what extent the positions of the local stakeholders
are a matter of NIMBY-like efforts to refuse the repository at all costs. But nevertheless,
given the fact that the dialogue failed, it might be worth for the implementers
to try to go a few steps back, and consider the possibility that perhaps still much
more work needs to be done in order to turn uncertainty into risk, in the first place
being more sensitive to the uncertainties and concerns that local stakeholders
articulate. Such approach may turn out to be not only more democratic, but also
more feasible and ‘efficient’.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Marijke Hermans, Zdeněk Konopásek, Yannick Barthe and two anonymous
reviewers for providing valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also
like to thank all partners within the InSOTEC project for discussions that inspired writing this
paper.
Funding
The data presented in this article were collected as part of the InSOTEC project supported by
the European Atomic Energy Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-
2011) [grant number 269906], carried out at the Center for Theoretical Study, the Institute for
Advanced Studies of the Charles University in Prague and the Academy of Sciences of the
Czech Republic.
Notes
1. According to the Czech ‘Atomic Act’ passed in 1997, the state is responsible for
radioactive waste management. The Act establishes the Radioactive Waste Repository
Authority (SÚRAO) as an organisation implementing radioactive waste management
policies. SÚRAO is subordinate to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. As will become
apparent later in the text, at some moments of the negotiations, representatives of the
Ministry came forward to speak instead of SÚRAO. Therefore, in this text the word
‘implementers’ is used to denote state authorities acting towards geological disposal
implementation, where it makes no difference whether these are SÚRAO or the
Ministry.
2. Moreover, scholars in science studies have introduced different variants of uncertainty,
to account for its different possible ‘degrees’. For instance Callon, Lascoumes, and
Barthe (2009) speak of ‘radical uncertainties’, whereas Wynne (1992) speaks of ‘ignorance’
and ‘indeterminacy’ as different flavours of uncertainty.
3. At this point, the difference between the theoretical foundations of the two perspectives
becomes apparent in the very notion of ‘constructivism’ – both of the paradigms have
engaged with the issue of risk construction, but in completely different ways. Representatives
of the risk-based paradigm have discussed the question whether risk is constructed
or whether it is real, and they have arrived at the conclusion that it is both
constructed and real, and therefore needs ‘a dual strategy for risk management’ (Klinke
and Renn 2002, 1076). In contrast, in the uncertainty-based paradigm, the question
whether risk constructed or real is irrelevant. Here, the important question is how it is
constructed (de Vries, Verhoeven, and Boeckhout 2011, 490).
4. In a very similar manner, Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe conclude that ‘[R]isk is that
which remains to be discussed once the work of exploration of technical and political
uncertainties has been taken to its end’ (2009, 228).
5. The 2015 deadline was moved to 2018 by a governmental resolution passed on 20
December 2012.
6. The following development is described in more detail in Konopásek and Svačina
(2014). For another overview, see Ďurďovič, Vajdová, and Bernardyová (2014).
7. This promise was voiced at many events (e.g. public debates in Věžná on 12 April
2012, in Blatno on 25 October 2012, a seminar in the Senate of the Czech parliament
on 24 April 2012, or the OECD-NEA Forum for Stakeholder Confidence in Karlovy
Vary on 25 October 2012), and became widely known among the stakeholders.
8. Public meetings in Bukov and Věžná, 7 and 9 January 2013.
9. Meeting of the Working group, 12 March 2013.
10. Cf. Barthe (2009) for a similar research strategy.
11. The same presentation was given during a number of other events, such as the Forum
for Stakeholder Confidence in Karlovy Vary (24–26 October 2012).
12. The nuclear fund was established by the Atomic Act of 1997. It is established at the
Czech National Bank, and supervised by the Ministry of Finance. All radioactive waste
producers are obliged to contribute to this fund; the amount of the contributions was set
Journal of Risk Research 1223
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by a governmental decree in 2002, and has not been changed since then. The nuclear
fund is supposed to pay for all radioactive waste management as well as for decommissioning
of nuclear reactors; therefore, also the operation of SÚRAO is financed from
the nuclear fund.
13. This is apparent for example from SÚRAO annual reports 2010–2013.
14. It can be observed that due to the hypothetical location, a Strategic environmental
assessment report would be more appropriate here. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the
Czech legislation at the time of publication, the report is written as an EIA report,
despite the lack of any site-specific information.
15. This observation supports Wynne’s argument that rather than ‘embracing uncertainties’,
which is the conventional view, science in public ‘gives prominence to a restricted
agenda of defined uncertainties.’ (Wynne 1992, 115).
16. Similar position has been characterised as that of ‘technologies of hubris’ (Jasanoff
2003).
17. Not only in the examples presented, but the author has not identified any such cases in
the whole data-set.
18. It should be noted that trust in state institutions in the Czech Republic is very low,
about 10% below the EU average (cf. e.g. Eurobarometer surveys available at http://ec.
europa.eu/public_opinion/cf/index_en.cfm).
19. This article (Svejkovský 2012b) was probably written in response to an article called
‘Geological research: One-kilometre-deep drill is a matter of routine’ published in a
SÚRAO leaflet (SÚRAO 2012).
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