European Union Contract Number: FP6-036413. Deliverable 23a. Towards Implementation of Transparency and Participation in Radioactive Waste Management Programmes, ARGONA Final Report

ARGONA is a project within the European Commission 6th framework programme. The overall objective was to support transparency of decision-making processes in the radioactive waste programmes of the participating countries, and also of the European Union, by means of a greater degree of public participation. The participating organisations were: Swedish Radiation Protection Authority (Coordinator) Karita Research AB, Sweden (Project Management) University of Gothenburg, Sweden Nuclear Research Institute Rez plc, Czech Republic University of Tampere, Finland DECONTA, Slovakia SCK.CEN, Belgium University of Lancaster, United Kingdom RAWRA, Czech Republic Stockholm University, Sweden Joint Research Centre, European Commission Galson Sciences Ltd, United Kingdom University of Stavanger, Norway Wenergy AB, Sweden The European Community under the Euratom 6th framework programme supported the ARGONA project, contract number FP6-036413. The project has been conduced with six work packages that together produced 25 Deliverables to the European Commission, available at the project web site http://www.argonaproject.eu . The final reporting consists of three documents: 1) This Final Report 2) The ARGONA Summary Report, and 3) Suggested Guidelines For Transparency And Participation In Nuclear Waste Management Programmes_ (ARGONA Deliverable No. 22). This Final Report and the Summary Report have similar structure to make it easy to combine the reading of the two. For example, a reader who finds a subject in the summary report for which he or she wants to go into more detail, he (or she) can go to this full Final Report where the individual chapters have the responsible work package leaders or task leaders as authors. End user input made it evident that there is a need for guidance for the application of approaches to participation and transparency. It was suggested that such guidelines could be divided into two different forms: 1) general guidelines or principles for the governance of nuclear waste management, and 2) more specific and pragmatic guidance, using e.g. _best practice_ and examples. The suggested guidelines has the purpose to be a first step towards meeting this need.