Review of New York State Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Process (1996) / Chapter Skim
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7 Discussion and Conclusions
7 Discussion and Conclusions
Pages 126-140
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From page 126... ...
The committee also attempts to identify the lessons that might be drawn from the New York experience for the benefit of decision makers involved in future efforts to site nuclear facilities, of which those involving nuclear waste may be a particularly useful example. EXTERNAL CAUSES In the committee's judgment, a significant cause of failure of the siting process was the unrealistic schedules imposed on the Siting Commission by law and regulation.
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From page 127... ...
Such an assessment would probably have indicated that the New York effort was unlikely to succeed within the narrow time constraints allowed by law and regulation, and it may have prompted the Siting Commission to adopt a more deliberative siting approach following the examples of other states and compacts. The difficulty ofthe Siting Commission's task was also increased by the intensity of public opposition.
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From page 128... ...
some aspects of the screening process were not well documented or technically defensible, and (3) strategic planning and quality assurance programs that could have identified and remedied these deficiencies were not put into place early enough in the process.
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From page 129... ...
Although the screening process may have led to the identification of licensable sites, the process itself was sufficiently complicated, with multiple screening steps involving different combinations of criteria and weighting factors, that it would have been very difficult for the Siting Commission to demonstrate to a skeptical public that superior sites did not, in fact, exist. The problems with the process identified in the latter stages of screening (e.g., the handling of offered sites; see Chapter 6)
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From page 130... ...
Strategic Planning and Quality Assurance Many of the technical problems identified in this report could have been addressed by the Siting Commission during the course of screening had strategic planning and a quality assurance program been properly developed and implemented early in the siting process.
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From page 131... ...
A quality assurance program would have helped the Siting Commission identify critical data to validate its decisions. The quality assurance plan would have forced the Siting Commission to address several critical aspects of the screening process, including the following: ZA strategic plan is a comprehensive, far-ranging plan for fulfilling an organization's mission over a specified period of time.
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From page 132... ...
, the commission responded: The prime contractor, Weston, was responsible for implementation of the QA Program. The Siting Commission has overall responsibility for establishing a quality assurance program for its own activities and for overseeing its contractors' quality assurance activities.
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From page 133... ...
The early implementation of the public participation plan may have appeared reasonably successful to the Siting Commission in that the public was informed, given an opportunity to provide input before decisions were made, and encouraged to comment on draft plans. As might be expected on the basis of other siting efforts, however, relatively few members of the public availed themselves of the opportunity to provide input at this stage of the process, probably because they did not connect this activity to their own communities.
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From page 134... ...
At this transition, public concern and the need for public participation increased significantly, yet critical decisions for example, the elimination of candidate areas based on a staff decision appear to have been made by the Siting Commission without adequate formal public review, and many of these decisions were not well documented. The site selection methodology required a number of subjective decisions by the Siting Commission.
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From page 135... ...
~ - 7 ~ ~ ~ ~ The committee believes that there are at least three important lessons to be learned from the Siting Commission's experience. First 4Such an approach can work reasonably well when decisions involve relatively little controversy or where a decision-making body enjoys high levels of public credibility and deference; like may other technically oriented bodies at the time, the Siting Commission may not have been aware that such top-down approaches tend not to work when used for something as controversial as siting a nuclear waste facility.
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From page 136... ...
areas are excluded, generally to the relief of those living there. Further, the need to create complex data sets to resolve such discrepancies can force the entire siting process toward expensive, timeconsuming, and generally unattainable goals Once the top-down screening process passes beyond the capabilities of the data and selection criteria to support technically defensible decisions, other strategies need to be considered.
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From page 137... ...
, time to make changes in the siting process in response to public comments, and, most of all, time to engage the affected communities effectively at each step of the siting process. As noted previously, time constraints imposed on the New York State Siting Commission by legislative actions and regulations did not allow effective public engagement to occur.
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From page 138... ...
involved what the scientific literature of the day called simply "special effects" that is, those effects resulting from the presence, or even the potential presence, of a nuclear waste facility in an area. These effects included high levels of public anxiety, opposition, and the potential for stigmatizing regions and peoples.
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From page 139... ...
The New York siting effort further confirms the results of social science research and previous experience on siting nuclear waste facilities. These results bear repeating: nuclear waste disposal evokes
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From page 140... ...
140 REVIEW OF NYS SITING PROCESS feelings of anxiety for many members of the public and results in special socioeconomic impacts in the affected communities, and siting efforts ignore these effects at their own peril. Indeed, siting efforts must be structured to address these effects through a high level of public involvement in the siting process.
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