Guaranteeing Transparency in Nuclear Waste Manage- ment: Monitoring as Social Innovation

Any activity involving radioactive materials, in industry, research, medical applications, and most notably nuclear power production, produces radioactive waste. The high level (life threatening doses of radiation) and long lived (radiation levels remaining intact up to 100.000 and even millions of years) wastes mainly from nuclear power plants, are thought to be too dangerous to keep forever within society, as they would need continuous (re)treatment. Therefore, already in 1957 the US National Academy of Science suggested deep geological disposal as the safest way to dispose of this type of waste (NAS 1957). In the long-lasting debate on how to best implement such a geological repository, “monitoring” is a central aspect currently under discussion. Mostly, the term refers to the technical gathering of data about the way, in which the repository and its surroundings develop. But also related societal processes of making sense of the technical data, and putting the act of monitoring in a context of responsible care or continuous vigilance, are part of the debate.