Women's Institute Consulted on Nuclear Waste

Leon Stringer writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Womens' Institute is being asked for their views on the disposal of nuclear waste while senior scientists resign in protest of being ignored. What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"

Comments

Who should decide?

[Auckerman]

How about ones that are qualified to properly dispose of nuclear waste. Presumably, leading engineers and scientists. You know, the ones that could potentially design a place to put the waste into, where by the local envrioment takes as small of an impact as possible. I don't think politicians and random interest groups typically qualify for this task.

Re:Who should decide?

[Auckerman]

Excellent plan, then we just move to wherever they are living since the storage obviously won't be in their back yards!

I find this view really odd, you know the "not in my back yard view". People are perfectly comfortable living in a place with continual toxic waste emissions. Car exhaust, toxins in everyday objects (paints, walls, toys, you name it), but the moment the word "nuclear" comes into play, all of a sudden images of toxic waste man comes to mind and superstition overrides reality. The fact of the matter is, as far as overall envriomental damage, nuclear is FAR clearer than how we typically power our cars and cities. It is a solvable problem and quite frankly people just need to realize it's less dangerous to live near a nuclear reactor or permant nuclear waste facility than it is to live near a coal powerplant or coal mining facility.

Re:Who should decide?

[Hal_Porter]

Hasn't it occured to you that a government consultation excercise might be just be a PC way to describe giving people a description of the problem and a list of all the technically feasible solutions with their pros and cons. That way they realise that none of the options are ideal, and yet one of them must be picked. If you describe it properly, they'll usually pick the best one. It's not like the men from the ministry arrive and listen to a bunch of women describing half arsed schemes for shooting waste into space.

The fatal problem with the kind of elitist solution you're describing is that all the non engineers and scientists feel that things are being done behind their backs and start to complain about it afterwards. This is exactly what happened with GM food - their was a wide spread, and as far as I can tell completely baseless, belief that the technology was inherently unsafe. The Guardian was one of the cheer leaders for this oddly enough - look at any of the columns by George Monbiot on GM, or anything technical. Lots of other people grumbled about a lack of consultation. So after that the Labour government has realised that you need to keep non technical people in the loop for this stuff, hence this sort of thing.

Oddly enough, in consultancy jobs, this is a very good technique - before you make a big change, you need to give the people that own the company a reason for the change, and a list of options and get them to pick one. In fact, it's almost exactly the same situation, since the people that you're trying to get in loop aren't particularly technical - and you're trying to avoid a situation where something breaks because of a change to their code which they haven't agreed on, which tends to be expensive for everyone.

bah

[machine of god]

Lets face it, it's a political issue, not an ecological one. They'd put it in juice boxes if it was cheap and nobody cared.

Re:So they should ignore the story?

[ackthpt]

What should The Guardian do? Bury the story because it doesn't play into your preconceived notions of progressive politics and what newspapers should print?

Instead of exaggeration by picking out one institute which has done one unusual thing for publicity (which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers) they could have simply headed it "1700 forms distributed to broad cross-section of community seeking public input", but that would probably not pique interest, would it?

Consider the source, mate.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[marcello_dl]

The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say.

Could be worse: Italy recently restored an electoral method that an overwhelming majority of people had voted to get rid of, back in 92: so we have three kind of governments, UK that asks people about their opinion, USA that ignores em, Italia that does the exact opposite of what people wanted.
But did anybody ask the people before going to war in Iraq in any of the three "democracies"?

Technical or political?

[peacefinder]

If they're asking non-technical people to make technical judgements, then it's daft.

But if they're asking for political opinions, then this is probably a good idea. No matter how good the technical decision, the choice still needs to survive a political process on the way to implementation. Soliciting diverse opinions up front will be helpful in getting the product through that painful phase. It beats pressing blindly forward and hoping for the best, anyway.

Re:So they should ignore the story?

[ScottyUK]

(which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers)

Page 2 in most of the (admittedly tabloid) Scottish papers I've seen is dedicated to "politics" of a sort. The mere thought of some of those women makes me shudder. Ann Widdecombe anyone? :|

Perhaps you mean page 3 ;) Unless you're discounting the front page as page 1, of course.

Re:Selective Nit-pickery

[Krach42]

WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in Carlsbad, New Mexico was entirely completed during the Clinton era.

It *also* had the same sort of sensationalistic criticism, as people are now attributing only to Bush.

Every administration that tries to do anything about getting rid of nuclear waste is going to hit resistence by the public, who are going to detest whoever is in charge, whether they ask them nicely or not.