Climate change and toxic waste: Yes, I care

How can we integrate and anticipate the impact of climate change on the management of toxic waste? What do civil society representatives and nuclear experts think? Feedback on the EURAD2-ULiege European nuclear workshop held on 26-29th of January 2026.

 

For four days, the Spiral Research Centre welcomed around thirty European nuclear experts and civil society representatives (from Nuclear Transparency Watch) as part of the Joint Programme. The participants shared their most advanced thoughts on the topic, asked challenging questions, proposed different frameworks and tested a serious game to consider the interrelationship between climate and radioactive waste management issues.

 

The EURAD2 project, which stands for the European Partnership on Radioactive Waste Management, is based on the ambitious premise that robust science and a safe and secure long-term management solution can only be created if technical research and development projects integrate ethical, social and economic dimensions and civil society reflections. As we often say at Spiral, radioactive waste management is not a technical project but a sociotechnical (without any bracket in between). This premise is the cornerstone of the EURAD2 project: public reflections must be integrated into ongoing scientific discussions.

 

The goal? Sharing the most up-to-date information, learning from ongoing national experiences and repeatedly experimenting with different ways of interacting in order to 'develop mutual understanding and active transdisciplinary collaboration' between stakeholders who should sit down together more often.

 

This will involve a visit to the Hadès Laboratory, long Q&A sessions, serious games, small group discussions, world cafés and numerous brainstorming sessions. In the online format or in face-to-face discussions, participants test and exchange ideas on different ways of interacting and work on the safety case programs asking questions such as: What should be considered a priority? What are our main concerns? Why?

 

‘EURAD project is not the place to create a new climate change model,’ says Koen Beerten (SCK-CEN). Climate change scenarios are there to test the robustness of long-term radioactive waste management solutions under new conditions. How should we respond to and anticipate extreme events (e.g. heavy rainfall and droughts) that are becoming increasingly intense and frequent? How do these events and new conditions challenge the initial programme for managing toxic waste? What needs to be changed? What should be taken into account? 

 

At the end of the first day of the workshop, the members of Nuclear Transparency Watch asked the participants, ‘Why are you participating in EURAD2?’ The responses were varied and unique to each participant: maintaining or strengthening a network, keeping up to date with the latest research, engaging in fruitful exchanges with different stakeholders and making a modest contribution to the discussions. Despite their contrasting perspectives, they all have one thing in common: they care about the fate of those toxic wastes. They recognise the existence of a 'negative commons' (Monnin, 2021) that must be cared for (Bergmans et al., 2023). These forms of care are as diverse as the actors involved, ranging from taking care of activists and their long-term commitments to considering the contribution of the humanities and social sciences in all technical issues more systematically (not only symbolically, but also providing clear financial support), considering the most extreme scenario to assess the robustness of a future facility, avoiding dehumanising acronyms, recalling safety principles and the impossibility of anticipating and translating everything, to patiently and humorously reformulating and explaining things to those we must deal with.

 

Building lasting interactions between the people who care about the fate of this toxic waste is as time-consuming and requires as much care as the construction of future facilities that will supposedly protect humanity and the environment for thousands of years. Both are as fragile as they are robust. Both create friction and irreconcilable differences, as well as valuable paths that are worth cultivating. Tomorrow, the EURAD2 participants will be among those ancestors who modestly tried to create 'long-term responsibility without colonising’ (Roman Krznaric). Because, yes, they care.

 

 

Author: Céline Parotte

 

References:

 

Bergmans, Anne, Catherine Fallon, et Céline Parotte. Do You Care About High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel? Opportunities for Co-Constructing an Appropriate Governance-Ecosystem in Belgium. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40496-3_4.

 

Krznaric, Roman. The good ancestor: How to think long term in a short-term world. Random House, 2020. 

 

Monnin, Alexandre. « Les « communs négatifs » ». Etudes Septembre, no 9 (2021): 59‑68.