ASU Research E-Magazine: When Politics and Science Collide

High level nuclear waste will remain dangerously radioactive for 100 centuries. That is nearly twice as long as the existing recorded history of humankind, and 50 times longer than the government of the United States has existed so far. What is a planet to do...

In the 1993 film version of “The Fugitive,” a federal marshal played by Tommy Lee Jones looks at a landscape of mangled steel, the aftermath of a spectacular and bloody train-bus collision and utters one of the great lines in movie history: “My-my-my-my-my-my-my!”

The destruction may not be as spectacular, but “My-my-my-my-my-my-my!” seems an appropriate reaction to the collision of forces over a desolate Nevada Ridge called Yucca Mountain 10 years ago.

“Train wreck” fairly describes what happened when science and politics met head on over a proposed nuclear waste repository site 90 miles from Las Vegas. The wreckage remains strewn across the social and political landscape. The casualties include the credibility of government and public trust. Scattered among the lingering mess is a growing pile of nuclear waste stored across the country at nuclear power plants.

Among the experts evaluating the collision and figuring out how to manage the problem both technically and institutionally are Arizona State University social scientists and planners David Pijawka and Alvin Mushkatel. Together, the researchers bring years of experience in studying both technological and environmental hazards from earthquakes to chemical weapons and nuclear waste.

What happened in Nevada is pretty clear. Why is a little baffling. Pijawka and Mushkatel have been studying the why to try to show the various parties involved how to diffuse the conflicts and avoid such collisions in the future.

In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a fairly comprehensive attempt to solve the growing nuclear waste problem in the United States. The act mandated that the Department of Energy (DOE), in consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), evaluate and select at least two disposal sites, one in the east, one in the west, for long term storage of high-level nuclear waste. High-level waste is primarily spent fuel rods from nuclear generating plants. Site selection would be based on scientific criteria to ensure minimal hazards during the 10,000-year period of dangerous radioactivity.

It was not a perfect solution, but it empowered states and Indian tribes to participate in the selection process. The act seemed to be the right track toward a publicly supported and equitable solution to the nation’s nuclear waste problem.

Just five years later, Congress parked its political bus right across the track. The train that started up in 1982 was derailed. The solution that seemed to be on board has been delayed from an original arrival time of 1998 to a tentative and partial delivery in 2010.

What happened? In a nutshell, lawmakers gutted the 1982 law and blessed DOE’s unilateral 1986 decision to abandon any examination of eastern sites and limit its study in the West to only Yucca Mountain.

Meanwhile, radioactive wastes continue to pile up beside nuclear reactors across the country. Many nuclear plants will soon come to the end of their natural lives, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reluctant to license new plants until the waste issue is resolved.

Based on surveys conducted by Mushkatel and Pijawka, the public, at least in Nevada, has lost faith in the DOE to safely manage and dispose of nuclear waste. The issue of disposal has both technical and institutional facets.

This did not have to happen, insists Mushkatel, who has helped government agencies establish relationships with the public in order to deal with a broad array of hazards. Indeed, parallel to his work for the State of Nevada, Mushkatel has served on the National Research Council’s Stockpile Committee overseeing the U.S. Army’s efforts to seek input on siting chemical weapons disposal sites.

Although far from perfect, the Army has established some trust with a few of the communities that its projects might affect. They spell out options and sincerely ask people to express their preferences about alternative technologies that can be used in the process.

What DOE and Congress failed to take into account in the 1986Ð87 Yucca Mountain decisions was the manner in which the public perceives risks and potential hazards, and the resulting behaviors. They could have asked Pijawka, who has studied the subject more thoroughly than anyone.

When scientists evaluate a hazard, whether it is an earthquake or a highway accident, they establish the probabilities that an event will occur and its consequences, Pijawka says. People who might be affected by that event, regardless of the probabilities, evaluate the hazard based on possibilities and often on their perceptions of how awful the event would be. They focus on the consequences.

“In the social sciences, environmental attitudes change over time, but slowly,” Pijawka says. “Perceptions of risks of various hazards may change,” particularly as new information becomes available and new technologies mitigate the risks.

That is the normal pattern, but it does not seem to work when it comes to nuclear materials and radioactivity and other risk events with low probabilities but serious consequences.

“In spite of substantial new information and government intervention efforts, concerns [over nuclear hazards] have not diminished in a decade of public-risk studies,” the ASU researcher continues. Nor has lack of public trust in the government agencies that have stewardship over the nation’s nuclear policies, says Mushkatel.

“What’s fascinating is how consistently people react to different hazards,” Pijawka explains. That consistency is especially fascinating with regard to nuclear hazards, where he found unchanging resistance to accept the repository in Nevada.

Colliding atoms seem to be the most feared form of threat to human health and existence, not to mention property values, business opportunities and general reputation of a region. All are topics covered in the work published by Mushkatel and Pijawka.

The ASU researchers, along with colleagues from around the country, are studying the notion of technological and place stigma. They hope to show how and why places become stigmatized, as well as the social and economic consequences of such stigma. Their work looks at the location impact of landfills, industrial accidents, sewage treatment plants, and groundwater contamination.

The public perception of nuclear risk is compounded when the government agency in question already has a bad reputation with a segment of the public. That certainly is the case with the DOE and the people of Nevada.

Nevadans remember clearly the nuclear tests that took place in the 1950s and early 1960s amid government assurances that they were quite safe. The agency at the time was the Atomic Energy Commission. When it was later established in the 1970s, the DOE inherited the AEC’s responsibilities and its negative reputation.

As Pijawka notes, the 1982 law seemed such a promising way to start overcoming the existing mistrust. It ensured that decisions about locating nuclear waste repositories would be based on a wide range of scientific data about locations, storage options, public perceptions, and environmental equity considerations. It put other government agencies like EPA in a position to advise the DOE, and it implied that the risks would be shared rather than concentrated on a single location.

“Science can suggest safer ways to deal with some hazardous waste problems,” Mushkatel says. “We use engineering and good science to provide the public with safety and assurances, provided this science and engineering is well implemented. The public must be involved.”

In an ideal decision-making process, the scientists tell the public what they are proposing and outline alternatives. For example, the National Research Council considers incineration to be a safe method for disposing of chemical weapons, Mushkatel points out.

There are other alternatives. The scientists involved have held hearings to explain options and relative risks to the communities that might be affected. Public preferences must be taken into account when a final decision is made.

Whatever hope the 1982 law created that siting for nuclear waste would follow such a deliberative process died in 1987 when Congress ratified DOE’s decision to focus all efforts on Yucca Mountain. The ASU researchers have been examining the perceptual and economic fallout of the 1987 amendment over the last decade and how it affects siting issues.

The motivation for gutting the 1982 act appears to be purely political, Mushkatel says. Congress and DOE were under a lot of pressure from the utilities industry to speed up the process in order to clear the way for licensing new nuclear plants.

If that was the idea, the plan backfired. Litigation and legislation by the people and government of Nevada subsequent to the 1987 act have delayed the process further, and the time frame for a repository has continually slipped.

“It takes a long time to develop trust between the public and government agencies,” Pijawka says.

How much longer does it take to restore trust that has been repeatedly broken? The research has taken Mushkatel and Pijawka into examining questions of trust and perceived trust in government and the dimensions of trust in siting various types of facilities.

“The entire way of dealing with the public has to change,” Pijawka adds. “We need to democratize the approach.”

Their research into alternative strategies for public-government partnerships has broken new ground, especially in areas prone to conflict such as in environmental disputes.

The 1982 act granted the affected states an overridable veto power. It created partnerships and “distributional equity.” It acknowledged the West’s reluctance to become the nuclear garbage dump for the East, where most of the waste is produced. It sought to base final decisions on sound science and engineering. It also provided a unique participatory partnership.

The 1987 act took all of that away.

“So who would trust that?” asks Pijawka.

“At its most basic level, government is stewardship,” Mushkatel says. “Government is a steward for public good. The government agrees to put aside short-term interests and act properly.”

Government stewardship also assumes technical competence, and, at least in the case of the Yucca Mountain decision, public trust in government was essential, says Mushkatel.

Another prime requisite for government stewardship is constancy. Mushkatel says that the problem of nuclear waste severely challenges that. High level nuclear waste will remain dangerously radioactive for 100 centuries. That is nearly twice as long as the existing recorded history of humankind, and 50 times longer than the government of the United States has existed so far.

“Turnover is a problem,” Mushkatel says, but it is a generic problem for all governments. “Politics are so dynamic and difficult today, we are more willing to make fundamental changes with regard to the assurances we’ve given people.”

Laws and constitutions are supposed to transcend political dynamics, but it took less than five years to alter the fundamentals of the 1982 law that aimed to protect the public’s interests from the more volatile aspects of government.

Regaining trust in that kind of political landscape will take some bold moves, Mushkatel says. An agency like DOE does not change overnight when a new president appoints a new secretary. Furthermore, the agency has to do much more than just acknowledge its past errors.

The agency can make such admissions, but when the public looks at the way Yucca Mountain has come about, the most likely response is, “What’s different?” Mushkatel adds.

Mushkatel and Pijawka hope to make a difference with the research they continue to conduct on public perceptions of environmental risks and hazards. They have looked at earthquakes, chemical weapons, toxic fires, housing for the homeless, pollution along the U.S.-Mexican border, and other issues in which one of the major factors is citizens’ “not-in-my-backyard” resistance. Other work includes issues surrounding the decommissioning of nuclear power plants.

Most recently, Congress cut all funding for the Nevada state agency charged with overseeing the DOE’s siting studies. In addition, it now seems likely that waste will be stored at the Nevada test site. Such action undercut any remaining trust people might have in the siting process, Mushkatel adds.

Scientists, too, must understand the public’s response to these issues. It is not sufficient to ignore public dread as uninformed.

“We may not be training scientists and engineers well for the next millennium, because we’re not insisting they understand policy and the relationship between science, technology, government, and the people,” Mushkatel says.

Mushkatel plans to incorporate what he has learned from the Yucca Mountain “train wreck” and other issues into undergraduate planning courses he teaches in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design. His students will be the ones dealing with issues of public trust, communication, environmental policy, and waste in the next century.

He believes that necessity will force solutions to the problems. “We are literally choking on our waste. Eventually, people are going to pursue what will work.” —George Cathcart