Judy Treichel, Executive Director
Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force
4550 W. Oakey Blvd., Suite 111
Las Vegas, Nevada 89102
U.S.A.

Acceptance of risk is a value-based decision; that is, the acceptance of risk by a person or group of persons depends on the values of the person or the shared values of the group. In the case of nuclear waste management, the nuclear industry, the regulators, and the general public approach risk from entirely different perspectives, dictated by the separate value systems held by each. The utilities producing radioactive waste view risk assessment as a part of a business decision that involves costs and benefits. The values that drive public acceptance of a national nuclear waste management policy are very different. As stated by Peter Montague of the Environmental Research Foundation:

The only people I know who are enthusiastic about quantitative risk assessment are people who want to gain permission to expose other humans to dangerous chemicals so someone can make money. Risk assessment has proven to be an effective way to gain the necessary permissions. [1]

Between the industry and the public are the regulators. Most national governments require regulatory agencies to establish rules that provide adequate public safety while allowing industries, whether nuclear or other producers of public commodities, to profitably do business.

The general population has always had a fragile relationship with nuclear proponents. There is an atmosphere of mistrust based on the understanding that the values that matter to the general public differ tremendously from those purported by the industry and regulators. The general public is more interested in worst case scenarios; that is, what is the most severe negative consequence to their safety and the safety of their children that could result from nuclear projects. There is no cost or benefit more important to the general public than the health and safety of their families.

Throughout the world there is public concern regarding the safety of food, medicine, chemicals and waste materials that can harm human health and the environment. Technology continues to advance so rapidly that most of the population has little real understanding of the scientific wonders that are reported almost daily in the media. We are bombarded with scientific breakthroughs and they seem very much like the scripts for science fiction films. There are now food crops that can fight off their own predators, and grow without seeds--one generation at a time. Irradiated food that promises to be fresh for extraordinarily long times with no harmful bacteria is advertised to be more affordable than the clean, garden -fresh foods that we prefer. Animals can be given feed with hormones and additives that kill or prevent their diseases and that get them to market sooner and at greater weight.

The public is seldom asked if they accept or reject any of these risks. In many cases the risk is imposed and it is considered the public’s job to prove that a product or project is harmful. When people become ill or die as a result of a food additive or chemical exposure, the burden of proof is very often placed on the victim. Consumers do have the ability, when faced with confusing and complicated decisions about food or other products, to refuse to buy. But this can only happen if people know about the products. Serious harm has occurred because of re-used waste products which no one knew about until it was too late.

Many waste industries are claiming scientific breakthroughs that allow materials that would otherwise need expensive disposal methods to be recycled back to the consumer. This means using slightly radioactive metals for consumer goods or waste animal parts for new feed products. When it was reported that animal parts were being used to make beef feed, the beef industry and growers of genetically altered crops were heavily impacted by public boycotts of their products. In this way the public can have a direct effect on the profits of a company and rapidly change the practice.

Public acceptability assumes that the public has a choice to accept or reject a risk–that the risk is voluntary. Unlike a meteor falling to the earth or a severe storm, which some insurance companies label acts of God, this is a discussion of risks that are man-made. Hence a choice exists; whether or not citizens feel the risk is worth the benefit of the technology.

Influencing public opinion is a multi-billion dollar industry. Advertising campaigns to sell products and political candidates confront us every time we turn on a radio or television set and from billboards and newspapers. In the U.S. Congress, a major issue currently being argued is campaign finance reform. Millions of dollars are spent on elections with most of the money buying campaign advertising. It is a well known fact that people who do not have access to tremendous amounts of money will have a very difficult time winning elective office. One of the primary concerns behind the reform movement is that major donors to campaigns receive favors and access to decision makers in exchange for campaign contributions. This has led to public suspicion that elected officials could provide more access to industry officials who are major campaign donors, and agree to eliminate or reduce necessary safety standards. If this were to happen, the right to impose a risk on others would have been purchased by those who benefit.

Historically the public has been subject to involuntary risk during wartime. Countries that created chemical, biological and nuclear weapons still have facilities that pose serious threats to the communities nearby. The material is very difficult to manage and dispose, remaining dangerous for years. Likewise, the legislation and official mind-set that created it lasts for generations. In the infancy of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the U.S., the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was passed giving sole ownership and control of nuclear materials to the government. The Act was later amended to promote the commercial development of atomic energy and made no mention of public safety. In answer to public demands for environmental protection, the Commission was split into two entities. One has evolved into the Department of Energy (DOE) and the other is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Both still function under the 1954 Atomic Energy Act–the same law that promotes nuclear power.

Congress selected Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the sole site to be investigated for a high-level nuclear waste repository in 1987. After the DOE had studied the site for about a decade it became obvious that meeting the statutory "General Guidelines for

the Recommendation of Sites for Nuclear Waste Repositories" would be impossible. They announced a proposed rulemaking which would remove qualifying and disqualifying conditions and replace them with an assessment of the system performance at Yucca Mountain. Following that action the NRC proposed new regulations that eliminate sub-system requirements and employ "risk informed, performance based" decision making. It appears that the investigating agency and the regulator are acting in concert and the public is left with the risk. The decisions are made based on computer modeling and probabilistic analysis rather than compliance with absolute benchmarks. But most disturbing is the fact that analysis and determination of risk is done by the party that stands to benefit and the regulator. Public interest organizations have raised serious concerns regarding these proposed new rules. People came in large numbers to hearings and provided comment and testimony opposing the proposals. Hundreds of environmental groups have signed on to petitions and letters expressing opposition to the enactment of the new rules because it appears that the public gets the risk and the industry reaps the benefit. At the present time the new rules are still just proposals but the DOE and NRC are rapidly approaching site recommendation and submission of a license application.

Many people are uncomfortable living near nuclear reactors and most communities do not want to become the home of a nuclear waste facility. In order for an agreement to be reached between the nearby residents and the builder/operator of the nuclear waste site, there must be trust. The people accepting the risk must also see a benefit–not necessarily a tangible one such as money, but perhaps one based on patriotism or a similar value. The most difficult part of the agreement is likely to be the trust element.

Gaining trust requires an historical evidence of worthiness. Such a track record does not exist near Yucca Mountain, the proposed location for a U.S. high-level nuclear waste repository. It is located adjacent to the Nevada nuclear weapons test site where atmospheric atomic testing was conducted in the 1950s and ‘60s. Residents were not told what the test site was until it was necessary to disclose the information because, when a bomb exploded, the flash was equal to or brighter than the noon-day sun. A resident of a town just east of the test site, Gloria Gregorson, described the first explosion. "I remember the day nuclear testing started in Nevada . . . the first blast came without warning. No one was informed that it was going to happen. The flash was so bright, it awakened us out of a sound sleep. We lived in an old two-story home, and when the blast hit, it not only broke out several windows, it made two large cracks in the full length of the house." [2] During her life, Gloria Gregorson contracted six forms of cancer and died at the age of 42.

It is unlikely that a sufficient amount of trust could be established, during the lifetime of current Great Basin residents, to gain public acceptance for a high-level nuclear waste facility. An old saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. This view is typical of the western U.S. attitude, especially toward the federal government.

This reluctance to trust is certainly not a phenomenon found only in the U.S. Great Basin region. Efforts are being made in Europe to encourage people to resume eating beef after the widespread fear of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease. The fears associated with radiation and mad

cow disease are quite similar in that infection or exposure is not detectable, and the incubation period is a very long time.

The question of which risks are acceptable depends ultimately on where the person passing judgement stands in relation to those risks. Under our current regulatory system, the risk of chemical exposures is usually passed on to the people who suffer those exposures. If 10 or 20 years later they come down with cancer or their children suffer health problems, identifying the cause–let alone proving it in a court of law–is virtually impossible. Companies find this arrangement profitable, and it certainly encourages technological innovation, but the cost to others can be considerable, as the tobacco industry and the makers of leaded gasoline have tragically proven. [4]

The public has always been at a financial disadvantage when opposing government programs. Public advocacy organizations and citizen groups have used ingenuity and community commitment to compensate for lack of resources. It was once common for the same public speaker to present very different messages about a single subject to various groups of people and it was unlikely that one audience would ever know what had been said to another. Advances in communication technology have made it harder and harder to isolate one audience from another.

Even the smallest advances in communication technology have huge impacts on public awareness. One instance, forty years ago, was when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) attempted to gain public acceptance from a native village in northern Alaska to detonate six thermonuclear bombs as an "atoms for peace" experiment called Project Chariot. The bombs ranged in size from 100 kilotons to 1 megaton and would be used to blast out a harbor. The residents were not in favor of the project so public relations people from the AEC went to meet with the people of Point Hope on the faraway coast within the Arctic Circle. Unbeknownst to the three AEC representatives, in about 1960 tape recorders had become an Eskimo fad. Since they had no written language and their culture was oral, by 1962, at the time of the meeting, more than half of the households had tape recorders and regularly exchanged tapes with other villages. At the meeting the people were told: ". . . the nuclear tests at the Pacific Proving Grounds had not contaminated fish with radiation . . . radioactive fallout from the Chariot blast would be so little that it would probably not be measurable with radiation detection equipment; the harmful constituents of fallout would for the most part be gone from Ogotoruk Creek in a matter of hours; people at Point Hope would not feel the seismic shock of the Chariot detonation thirty-one miles away; a study of cattle in the Nevada desert offered evidence as to harmlessness of fallout moving through an Arctic ecosystem; American nuclear testing had not harmed "Indian" people anywhere; and that once Japanese survivors who received "very great exposures" recovered from radiation sickness, they suffered no further effects." And the Eskimos got it all down on tape. [3] This was an eventuality that the officials sent there never expected. All of the claims made by the three spokesmen were false. Ultimately, the opposition was successful in defeating the project.

As technology has advanced and become more difficult for the public to understand, public communication has increasingly become more accessible and efficient. The Internet has allowed people around the world to transfer information instantaneously and inexpensively. Just as the communication technology is changing on a moment-to-moment basis, so, it seems, is the DOE message. Rather than telling the public in a straightforward fashion how a repository at Yucca Mountain would work, the suitability of the site and project are presented through complicated probabilistic risk assessments which are then put through a risk-informed, performance-based decision making licensing process.

When the people of Point Hope, Alaska were told direct lies, they did not know if the facts were true or false but they sent the tapes to people who could advise them. When Nevadans are given the graphs and tables resulting from the computer modeling that goes into a Yucca Mountain total system performance assessment, they can go to "experts" to see if the conclusions are accurate and in many cases, the answer will depend on who the expert is. When the high levels of uncertainty are considered, many answers could be right. Therefore, it amounts to guess work. The Yucca Mountain proponents have told Nevadans that "science will decide." But the question is: whose science? With the more statistic-based approach DOE is now taking, it appears more likely that mathematics will decide. Mathematical computations are already being used to screen out features, events, or processes that, according to the numbers, are too improbable or inconsequential. One example is seismicity. Nevada residents experience earthquake jolts every few years. Regardless of the modeling results and engineering fixes, they do not believe that Yucca Mountain should be recommended as a repository site because it is located in a seismically active location.

There now exists a jumble of over-lapping and inter-acting computer models combined with expert judgement to analyze probability, consequence, risk and radiation doses. While that work is being done the same federal agencies providing the analysis are creating the rules that the results will have to comply with. The public, with good reason, believes that when all of the data, mathematical probabilities and expert elicitations have been analyzed, results which can be attained will determine the rules.

Throughout the life of the project public audiences have asked DOE officials, "what could you find at Yucca Mountain that would disqualify the site?" Within the last year the answer has become "nothing."

There is probably no population more educated in the subject of risk and probability than the citizens of Nevada, residents in the gambling capital of the world! Even if you do not gamble yourself, as a Las Vegan you see the crowds that gather at the casinos to test the very high odds. The casino industry calculates its profit through probability and the customer gambles on the consequence and the belief that if there is a chance of winning a jackpot, regardless of how small. You do not need math to know that unexpected good fortune can occur and you could be the winner but Las Vegans will tell you with a smug smile that the town was not built on winners. Nevadans are accustomed to industry painting an unrealistically bright picture of benefit vs. risk. It is not surprising, therefore, that Nevadans believe that if there is a chance of being exposed to radiation from a repository, the surface facility or a transport vehicle, they could be the loser. Math will not convince the average person that improbable, deadly accidents and /or incidents will not happen. What were the odds of an American Naval submarine suddenly surfacing directly beneath a Japanese fishing boat?

Many Nevadans and millions of other people choose not to gamble in casinos. Polls indicate that 75 percent of Nevadans oppose Yucca Mountain and refuse to gamble with high-level nuclear waste. Both choices should be their right.

Many countries, including the U.S. are not ready to embark on a nuclear waste disposal project. Before any successful program can be initiated, the will of the public must be known. You cannot determine if public acceptance exists without knowing people’s expectations regarding a disposal program. And you cannot claim to have adequately factored in public acceptance or refusal without an accurately informed public. Perhaps the only point of agreement at this time is that the material is very dangerous and must be isolated from the biosphere.

For an individual, group or community to accept a risk, they must be informed and this requires established basic principles. For instance, there must be consistent, truthful, and understandable communication about the nature of the proposed risk. It must also be clear to those considering the risk that to do so would be compatible with community values. The DOE uses the language of benefit versus risk in its arguments for the proposed repository. The question of risk acceptance is a question of choice. In order to make the choice of whether or not to take a risk, you must know exactly what that risk is in terms of the consequences of a potentially harmful event, and the likelihood it will occur. It seems that the public understands this basis premise as clearly recognized in a recommendation in a recently published report by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas on the issue of political and moral legitimacy of the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain:

"It is an inalienable principle of a democratic republic that all government derives its just powers from the free and informed consent of the governed. Any act or policy proposed without that consent is illegitimate, in principle. If the people choose to ignore an act as having little or no consequence, or not worth their concern, they have little ground for complaint. But when a large number of people, virtually an entire affected population, rejects a policy as politically tyrannous and morally illegitimate, as having been made without just distribution of benefits-to-burdens, then that government, for the sake of its soul, is obligated to withdraw that act or policy and return to the basics, and seek some other policy which can acquire the free consent of the governed."[5]

It must be remembered that, if people are kept uninformed of dangers they are exposed to, they are not accepting a risk: They are being victimized.

1. Lochbaum, David, Nuclear Plant Risk Studies, Failing the Grade, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2000

2. Miller, Richard L., Under the Cloud, Macmillan, Inc., New York, New York, 1986

3. O’Neill, Dan, The Firecracker Boys, St Martin’s Press, New York, New York, 1994

4. Rampton, S and Stauber, J. Trust Us, We’re Experts, Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York, New York, 2001

5. Walton, C. and Zundel, A., et al, Environmental Justice in the D.O.E. Yucca Mountain D.E.I.S.: An Analysis of the Treatment of Environmental Justice Issues in the Department of Energy’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Proposed Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain and Other Documents, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2000