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

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: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.