Collaboration by Deflection: Coping with Spent Nuclear Fuel

• Published date: 01 March 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02493.x
• Author: Joseph J. Karlesky
• Date: 01 March 2012

Joseph J. Karlesky is The Honorable

and Mrs. John C. Kunkel Professor of

Government at Franklin and Marshall

College. He received his doctorate in

public law and government from Columbia

University. He is coauthor of The State of

Academic Science: The Universities

in the Nation’s Research Effort and

coauthor of three editions of the textbook

American Government. His teaching

and research focus on public policy, particu-

larly the interrelationships between public

policy and science and technology and the

consequences of these interrelationships for

policies in energy and health. He regularly

teaches courses in American government,

understanding public policy, public policy

implementation, and health policy.

E-mail: joe.karlesky@fandm.edu

196 Public Administration Review • March | April 2012

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 72, Iss. 2, pp. 196–205. © 2011 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2011.02493.x.

Joseph J. Karlesky

Franklin and Marshall College

For more than three decades, the U.S. national

government has wrestled with the problem of siting a

central repository for high-level radioactive waste, most

of it spent fuel from nuclear power plants. Scholars

and practitioners recommend a collaborative and

participative approach to the siting process to ensure

accountability and representativeness, but the search

for a working repository so far has been unsuccessful.

Consequently, more nuclear power plants must add or

expand dry cask facilities to store accumulating amounts

of spent fuel. Are collaboration and accountability and

successful execution of results possible in state decisions

on dry cask storage in a way that they have eluded

the central siting process?  e special characteristics of

dispersed dry cask storage, in contrast to transporting the

waste to a central repository, can facilitate collaboration

and accountability, as decisions on dry cask storage in

Minnesota and Vermont demonstrate.

Can the governing principles of a collabora-

tive, participatory, civic environmentalism

be applied to the enduring political problem

of spent nuclear fuel, an unwelcome consequence

of authoritarian decision-making structures in the

infancy of atomic power? At a time of intensifying

debate over energy and environmental policies, the

very high stakes in deciding what to do with spent

nuclear fuel place in sharp ref‌l ection the value con-

f‌l icts over decision-making structures that we confront

in governing.  e vexing and exhausting political

struggle over spent nuclear fuel places in especially

bold relief the contest between policy execution and

democratic accountability. Balancing the need to exer-

cise power and the need to keep its use accountable

is the central question in democratic policy making.

Producing energy through nuclear f‌i ssion is a techno-

logical marvel that at once ref‌l ects inventive ingenuity

and the durable political problem of deciding how to

proceed in making public policy decisions.

Civilian nuclear power can help the nation mitigate

global warming by reducing reliance on fossil fuels,

strengthen national security by bolstering energy

independence, and moderate rising energy prices

by increasing the diversity of energy sources. At the

same time, civilian nuclear energy burdens energy

users with very expensive capital facilities, threatens

national security by of‌f ering terrorists opportunities

to wreak radiological disasters, and jeopardizes the

environment by producing highly toxic waste that no

one wants. What good or goods in this debate do we

decide shall prevail, and how do we go about deciding

in the f‌i rst place? A modern technology enlightens an

old problem in the study of politics.

 e study of how public policy decisions are made is at

the core of the study of politics and the central question

in classics in the discipline, from E. E. Schattschneider’s

propositions on the scope of conf‌l ict and its outcome

(1960, 2–5), to Hugh Heclo’s expansion of iron trian-

gles to issue networks (1978, 100–5), to Robert Dahl’s

exposition of trade-of‌f s in the concentration or disper-

sion of power (1982, 105–7), to Aaron Wildavsky’s

explication of system politics in struggles over partisan-

ship and policy (1966, 304–5). Students of politics

know that procedure shapes the substance of decisions,

an axiom that explains the intensity of political strug-

gles over who should decide given questions and the

decision rules they will follow.  e high stakes in the

political f‌i ght over spent nuclear fuel put in sharp focus

the decision structures that will determine what hap-

pens to high-level nuclear waste that is both physically

and politically radioactive. Practitioners and scholars

stress the importance of widespread participation and

collaboration among stakeholders in environmental de-

cision making to bolster the political legitimacy of f‌i nal

decisions.  e unique characteristics of spent nuclear

fuel allow such collaboration under some conditions

but have sharply resisted it under others, placing in an

unusual light the relationship between decision-making

structures and substantive decisions.

Renaissance and Reservation in Nuclear

Policy Debate

Nuclear power plants have been viewed alternately

as potentially valuable energy sources in a world of

Collaboration by Def‌l ection: Coping with Spent Nuclear Fuel