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Framing Ethical Acceptability: A Problem with Nuclear Waste in Canada

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Abstract

Ethical frameworks are often used in professional fields as a means of providing explicit ethical guidance for individuals and institutions when confronted with ethically important decisions. The notion of an ethical framework has received little critical attention, however, and the concept subsequently lends itself easily to misuse and ambiguous application. This is the case with the ‘ethical framework’ offered by Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), the crown-corporation which owns and is responsible for the long-term management of Canada’s high-level nuclear fuel waste. It makes a very specific claim, namely that it is managing Canada’s long-lived radioactive nuclear fuel waste in an ethically responsible manner. According to this organization, what it means to behave in an ethically responsible manner is to act and develop policy in accordance with its ethical framework. What, then, is its ethical framework, and can it be satisfied? In this paper I will show that the NWMO’s ethical and social framework is deeply flawed in two respects: (a) it fails to meet the minimum requirements of a code of ethic or ethical framework by offering only questions, and no principles or rules of conduct; and (b) if posed as principles or rules of conduct, some of its questions are unsatisfiable. In particular, I will show that one of its claims, namely that it seek informed consent from individuals exposed to risk of harm from nuclear waste, cannot be satisfied as formulated. The result is that the NWMO’s ethical framework is not, at present, ethically acceptable.

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Notes

  1. The full content of the framework can be found at: http://www.nwmo.ca/uploads_managed/MediaFiles/624_2-7EthicalandSocialFramework.pdf.

  2. Roundtable on Ethics meeting minutes, 8 June 2005. http://www.nwmo.ca.

  3. This particular item, Q10.d, is present in the online version of the document, but not the final report.

  4. http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/ethics_code.html.

  5. This line of reasoning is also found in the OECD’s discussion of nuclear waste. It claims that it “takes intergenerational equity issues into account, notably by applying the same standards of risk in the far future as it does to the present” (OECD and Agency 1995). This supposedly justifies its recent 2008 claim that: “Radioactive waste shall be managed in such a way that predicted impacts on the health of future generations will not be greater than relevant levels of impact that are acceptable today” (Fleming 2008, 115).

  6. See Shrader-Frechette (2002b) for a good discussion of this issue, especially Chap. 5: “Equity and Duties to Future Generations: The Case of Yucca Mountain.”

  7. See the NWMO Advisory council meeting: 18 October 2004.

  8. See also IAEA (1995, 2002).

  9. http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/rf/plutoniu.htm.

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Correspondence to Ethan T. Wilding.

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Wilding, E.T. Framing Ethical Acceptability: A Problem with Nuclear Waste in Canada. Sci Eng Ethics 18, 301–313 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9262-6

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