Public participation in site selection for nuclear waste repositories
In an EU research project Oeko-Institut is providing expert support in the implementation and monitoring of participation procedures in the selection of nuclear waste repository sites in Central and Eastern Europe. Slovenia, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia want to incorporate the public in the planning and selection of each repository site. Together with research partners from 12 countries Oeko-Institut is providing support for the selected measures of participation. The researchers are carrying out surveys of different groups of actors in order to derive suggestions for optimising the participatory approaches.
Experts at the institute are elaborating concrete recommendations for implementing participative processes in the site selection for nuclear waste repositories in the selected countries with the goal of:
- making stakeholder processes transparent and achieving a high standard in participation procedures;
- improving the quality of the decision-making processes for the final disposal of nuclear waste; and
- organising these discussions on national level and utilizing the experiences for the international context.
A toolbox for fair and transparent participation procedures
The experiences that are made in Central and Eastern Europe are entered into a knowledge data base for participatory processes, methods and instruments established within the scope of the project. These experiences can be subsequently drawn upon by Germany and other countries in their site selection procedures.
The IPPA project – in which Oeko-Institut is working together with 16 partners from 12 different European countries – is sponsored by the EU under the 7th Framework Programme. It is planned that the first project results will be made available at the end of 2013.
Further information
Details of the project, partners and results can be found on the “Im-plementing Public Participation Approaches in Radioactive Waste Disposal” (IPPA) project website