Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2006

Publication Title

2006 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society

Publisher

Insitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

First page number:

1

Last page number:

3

Abstract

Long time-horizon environmental risks with potential for global impacts have increased in visibility over the past several decades. Such issues as climate change, the nuclear fuel cycle, persistent synthetic chemicals, and stratospheric ozone depletion share some characteristics, including intergenerational impacts, strongly decoupled incidence of risks and benefits, substantial decision stakes and extreme uncertainty. What is not well understood are the similarities and differences among sources and implications of uncertainty among these global environmental threats, especially those associate with current and future human behavior. This describes the uncertainties associated with managing two global concerns: the nuclear (fission) fuel cycle and anthropogenic climate change. It finds that the two issue share some common uncertainties, some highly differentiated uncertainties and some interdependent uncertainty. It argues that these uncertainties preclude simple conclusions about the tradeoffs between risks from anthropogenic climate change and those from nuclear power. It concludes that a framework that treats uncertainty as an aspect of management, not as an analytical challenge, will both improve options for effective policy making and provide direction for useful (from a policy perspective) future research.

Keywords

Climate change; Nuclear energy; Policy making

Disciplines

Climate | Environmental Policy | Oil, Gas, and Energy | Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation | Public Policy

Language

English

Comments


©2006 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Proceedings of the ISTAS '06 Disaster Preparedness and Recovery, June 9-10, 2006, Flushing, NY. IEEE.

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