Paper short abstract:

Following a legal rejection of a key regulatory principle, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission enacted a two-year effort to create a new governing rule. Public trust, confidence in technical/institutional capacity, and technocscientific governance are examined in the “waste confidence” controversy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the track's topics and themes including nuclear waste governance, temporality, and spatiality, highlighting the largely-incommensurable approaches of nuclear proponents and critics. In 2011, a U.S. court discarded a long-established regulatory principle known as "Waste Confidence," which asserted that adequate capacity for storage and final disposal of used nuclear fuel would be available when needed. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) then undertook a two-year effort to develop a new regulatory principle, including an extended public engagement program. The result, a principle now named "Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel," disappointed critics, leading to new legal challenges. This paper examines the waste confidence controversy using a theoretical framework grounded in Niklas Luhmann's concepts of risk, time-binding (the linking of present decisions to future states), and analytical distinctions between "confidence" and "trust." Data utilized include court documents, documents related to the USNRC's environmental impact study for used fuel storage and disposal, archived public comments and public meeting recordings, and direct engagement with nuclear industry staff, regulatory staff, and members of critical nongovernmental groups. Following Luhmann's distinction, the "confidence" articulated by industry and government actors is a very different phenomenon from the "trust" considered essential by nuclear critics and communities hosting nuclear power plants and proposed sites for interim and final used fuel disposal. Engaging and expanding additional concepts from actor-network theory, the paper argues that nuclear waste storage and disposal are "obligatory passage points" or "trials of strength" for the U.S. as well as the global nuclear power enterprise.