Understanding the Choices is the NWMO’s second discussion document, an important milestone in a three-year study (2002-2005) designed to recommend to the Government of Canada an approach to managing Canada’s used nuclear fuel for the long term. The report begins with an examination of the values and priorities of Canadians, and how the NWMO has used this understanding to build a framework to assess and compare management approaches.

In sum, we vacate 40 C.F.R. part 197 to the extent that it incorporates a 10,000-year compliance period because, contrary to EnPA section 801(a), that compliance period is not<br> &quot;based upon and consistent with &quot; the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences. The remaining challenges to the EPA rule are without merit. We vacate the NRC rule insofar as it incorporates EPAÕs 10,000-year compliance period. In all other respects, we deny NevadaÕs petition for review challenging the NRC rule.

The foundation for work related to nuclear waste management is laid by laws and outlines e.g. the responsibilities of the reactor owners and the state, as represented by the authorities. The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), as well as Posiva Oy in Finland, were set up by the reactor owners in the respective countries in response to the responsibilities of planning, conducting research and to implement the physical structures leading to a safe management of nuclear wastes.

Isolation in a geologic setting has been the generally favored solution to the high-level radioactive waste (HLW) problem since a scientific basis for nuclear waste management began to be formulated over half a century ago. Although general features of suitable settings have been enumerated, quantitative measures of the safety of geologic isolation of HLW are challenging to devise and to implement.

Programs to manage and ultimately dispose of high-level radioactive wastes are unique from scientific and technological as well as socio-political aspects. From a scientific and technological perspective, high-level radioactive wastes remain potentially hazardous for geological time periods—many millennia—and scientific and technological programs must be put in place that result in a system that provides high confidence that the wastes will be isolated from the accessible environment for these many thousands of years.

During the 1990s, nuclear waste programmes in nearly every concerned country met many difficulties. Nuclear waste management was seen as a technical issue, and the local communities were only involved in the last stage of the decision-making process when almost all components of the decision were already fixed. The management of high level radioactive waste is now recognised as a complex decision-making process entailing technical, ethical, social, political and economic dimensions where no solution can be reached solely on the basis of technical considerations.

On 10 March 1999, The Netherlands signed the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, which was subsequently formally ratified on 26 April 2000 and entered into force on 18 June 2001. The Joint Convention obliges each contracting party to apply widely recognized principles and tools in order to achieve and maintain high standards of safety during management of spent fuel and radioactive waste.