Operationalising intergenerational justice for long-term geological storage and disposal
Summary
Intergenerational justice concerns itself with the just distribution of risks and benefits across generations, including people thousands of years into the future, and is inherent in the concept of sustainability. For two issues in particular, decisions need to made right now that carry large intergenerational justice considerations: disposal of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants or other nuclear applications, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). Both will likely be achieved with long-term geological facilities, which need to be planned and managed in such a way that harm for future generations is minimised. The policies made today concerning nuclear waste disposal and CCS will thus impact the lives of generations far into the future and as such, care must be taken to safeguard intergenerational justice. However, there is no established framework for assessing how intergenerational justice for the distant future is operationalised and safeguarded in policy, despite the importance of applying the justice theory in practice.
The aim of this research is to develop an assessment framework for how intergenerational justice is operationalised in long-term policy and to apply this framework to different national nuclear waste disposal and CCS policies in order to determine how intergenerational justice should be operationalised in policy in order to best safeguard the rights of future generations.
The assessment framework was developed through a systematic literature review and consists of ten criteria, based on six principles: future impacts, vision of future, time scale, freedom of choice, financing, and discounting. This framework can be applied to any long-term policy in order to assess how well it safeguards intergenerational justice.
The framework was applied to the nuclear waste disposal policies of the Netherlands, the UK and Finland, as well as to the CCS policies of the Netherlands, the UK and Norway. In general, the nuclear waste disposal policies perform better than the CCS policies on all six principles of intergenerational justice, and the former can thus act in part as an example for the development of future CCS policies that better safeguard intergenerational justice. Still, the nuclear waste disposal policies have significant improvements to make, in particular when it comes to the principles of vision of future, freedom of choice, and discounting. All countries would do well to include more insights from the intergenerational justice literature in their policies, as currently, no policy is able to adequately operationalise intergenerational justice such as to safeguard this principle.