Deliberative Democracy for the Future: The Case of Nuclear Waste Management in Canada.

• Author: Endres, Danielle
• Position: Book review

Deliberative Democracy for the Future: The Case of Nuclear Waste Management in Canada. By Genevieve Fuji Johnson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008; pp. 169. $24.95 paper.

We face an impending high-level nuclear waste crisis (not to mention low-level and transuranic waste). The countries that use nuclear technologies are now grappling with how to address the ever increasing quantities of high-level nuclear waste resulting from nuclear power and weapons development. The United States is no exception. According to former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham (2002), "We have a staggering amount of radioactive waste in this country ... with more created every day" (p. 1). The Department of Energy (USDOE, 2008) estimates that in April 2008 there were 56,000 metric tons of spent fuel and 22,000 canisters of defense related high-level nuclear waste from reprocessing; by 2035, the United States will have approximately 119,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste. In 2002, after a twenty-year process of researching a federal high-level nuclear waste repository site, the Secretary of Energy, the President, and both houses of Congress authorized the siting of the Yucca Mountain High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada. In June 2008, the Department of Energy (DOE) submitted a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the Yucca Mountain site. Pending licensing, Yucca Mountain will be the home to 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste. And yet, as the previously mentioned DOE estimates indicate, by 2035 US will still be faced with almost 50,000 metric tons of waste in excess of the capacity of the Yucca Mountain site.

There is no doubt that we need a solution to the nuclear waste crisis. Yet, creating a solution has proven to be quite difficult. High-level nuclear waste siting decisions in the United States have been intensely controversial from the over twenty-year struggle over the Yucca Mountain High-Level Nuclear Repository, to the ill-fated Monitored Retrievable Storage program, to the recently defeated Private Fuel Storage proposal to temporarily store 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation. Nuclear Waste storage poses a considerable technical challenge due to the over 100,000 year half-lives of the isotopes in radioactive waste. However, nuclear waste storage is not merely a technical issue. More importantly, there are communicative, social, ethical, political and cultural considerations that must be addressed when a society attempts to create a solution to nuclear waste. Genevieve Johnson's book, Deliberative Democracy for the Future: The Case of Nuclear Waste Management in Canada examines the ethical dimension of the puzzle of nuclear waste storage. Johnson, a political scientist, specifically examines the case of nuclear waste siting from an applied ethics approach. What can Johnson's analysis contribute to communication, specifically argumentation scholars? And, what, if anything, can Americans learn from Canada's nuclear waste siting process?

The thesis of Johnson's manuscript is...