 Thank you, and thank you for coming to this my guest today is Daniel Metley. He's spent 25 years maybe more in the field of nuclear waste disposal He has a technical undergraduate degree. He went to Berkeley and studied political science and public policy And then he's worked in various ways Throughout the nuclear waste disposal issue. He's now a senior staff member at the nuclear waste technical review board One of the things that struck me But throughout this this afternoon a very interesting conversations is how much this is sort of the Everything you thought you knew was wrong Sort of afternoon and and what I think is really interesting About this issue with nuclear waste disposal is that that most if you talk to people in In say if you talk to senior scientists at Sandia labs They get very wound up on the discussion of nuclear waste disposal and I say it's just people would just listen to the science They get very apoplectic about it if they would listen to the science They would know what was right and and I think we have put for 30 years we've put an emphasis on on listening to the science and We spent 10 to 15 billion dollars and we have Yucca Mountain and And I think in our conversations. You said the best that can be said about that is that it's in flux So what I wanted to talk about was Why is Sweden closer to having a disposal system? Let's get let's start that off and then we'll kind of back up to what's going on with the United States Yeah, thank you, Lisa before I say anything more I need to give a bureaucratic disclaimer anything that I say has No connection necessarily with my agency the nuclear waste technical review board any opinions. I have are my own But let's get back to your question. I think you can isolate three very Indicted factors that make a difference in the Swedish case Sweden is about one year away from kind of deciding on where they're going to dispose their waste It's a little bit more They've begun a process It's not clear just how many years it will take and it's certainly not clear what the final outcome of that Process is going to be so the title of this little discussion is perhaps a bit hyperbolic and Maybe a little premature which will teach you a lesson to believe just what you read So back to the story about so so I would say there are three kind of interconnected ingredients that the Swedes have dealt with Fairly successfully that gives me at least some cause for optimism That they will come up with a solution and by solution I mean the licensing and operation of a deep-mind geologic repository so the three factors are political Technical and social and I would argue you need all three in order to make a difference So let's start with the political in Sweden the powers distributed between the central government and the municipalities in a way that accords the municipalities Virtually an unlimited veto over anything taking place within their Boundaries having to do with development and that includes citing a geologic repository The veto is not absolute, but for all practical purposes. I think people do believe that if a community Objects to the citing of a facility within their borders They will prevail The second thing has to do with technical The Swedish repository concept is has a lot of things going for it Essentially disposing of spent nuclear fuel in granite formations and the things that it's got going for it are The concept is easy to explain to the public There are natural analogs that the public can see that gives them confidence that the That the concept is a viable one and the third factor is That if you believe in the law of thermodynamics The concept is a very powerful one because it rests very firmly on the second law of thermodynamics So the technical things I think they've done very well, and then we get to the social I think there are two aspects of the social situation in Sweden that Facilitate the development of a repository first There is a high degree of trust Among Swedes for their regulatory authority second there is a Cultural attitude that's not adversarial. There's a desire to reach consensus So I would argue that these three elements the political the technical and the social All combined in Sweden to facilitate the progress that they've made So tell me just a bit about the process because my impression is basically rather than saying we'll let scientists figure it out And then we'll go talk to the towns. They basically said we'll figure out the politics first and then we'll figure out the science Yeah, that was a lesson that they came to the hard way in the early in the late The the implementer the organization responsible for developing a repository Essentially marched out into the Swedish countryside and said oh by the way, we're gonna do some Some tests here to see whether your land will work as a repository and the the result of that approach was roads being blockaded Considerable antagonism amongst the public and In a sense, it's surprising because everybody understands the political power that municipalities can exercise anyway, they sort of retreated from that position and in the early 1990s essentially initiated this voluntary process and a Number of communities indicated some preliminary interest and in the end three communities were seriously interested and The implementer decided that they would do more extensive Geological tests at two of the communities and they were actually in competition with each other both communities Were strongly interested in hosting a repository Was sort of using the Tom Sawyer approach about painting the fence, you know Get getting people to compete to do this thing which could be considered awful Yeah, so and and what's interesting here is that it's not just the the it's not something innate to Sweden that helped them Because political consensus is valued in Japan, but they've had a much harder time reaching the consensus It has something to do with the building the political basis first and then going in and doing Yeah, I'm not sure we can Attribute an order to this because Switzerland seems to be moving forward very very well and they started out with a very technical approach The Japanese as you say had a very similar volunteer approach with with no success The British are engaging in a volunteer process so far. They have one area of the country That is express some interest whereas Canada has a voluntary process and they have 18 communities that are actually Interested in potentially hosting a repository. I think it's the combination of the political the technical and the social I don't think you can Succeed unless you capture all three of those things and and I think the other thing too is trust There has to be a level of trust Can you talk a little bit about because we we don't have a lot of time left But can you talk a little bit about how we would reimagine this in the US if we were? Let's say let's say that we decided we were going to forget about Yucca Mountain Not that we are but if we did how would we go? How could we go forward? We have to put the way somewhere as as you probably know President Obama appointed a blue ribbon commission and they published a report on this subject last in January and A core part of their argument was that you needed to do a consent-based Process that you really had to start out with the politics I Think the experience in this country using Processes that are not consent-based is pretty dismal and so I think the BRC's position with respect to a Consent-based process is probably correct My feeling however was that they failed to give proper recognition that it's this package of Political technical and social that you've got to work on Simultaneously and that working in one aspect To the detriment perhaps of some of the others is is going to be very difficult If you if you imagine something going forward, what would it be? How would you build trust? How would you build trust? Well? in When I worked for the Department of Energy I was asked by the secretary to lead a task force looking specifically at this question of Public trust and confidence in DOE and the result of the task force was essentially to say You can't have a menu of behaviors pick one here You want to pick one here pick one here and somehow hope that you'll generate trust I think the key conclusion of that study was building trust is a recipe It's like trying to bake a cake without any eggs It's just not going to work and you are you need to recognize that Every choice you make as an agency Has implications for public trust and confidence in that agency and it's a tough task particularly for an agency like DOE who over the years has for whatever reason has Built up kind of a legacy of distrust I think this is a very interesting sort of side point to what's going on in the in the greater Discussion in this room about how do you how does science work with public policy? You know the trust is a key part of it and and the science is actually relatively small and when Perhaps well to end this conversation one of the things that always makes me laugh is that that science always ends up generating these blue ribbon panels and One of the things about blue ribbon panels is that they talk to other people in Blue ribbon rooms about blue ribbon subjects and there needs to be sort of a perhaps blue ribbon panel You know you need to sort of get out there and mix it up and deal with the things that make people anxious and And and thank you very much. I appreciate your it's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation