COST-BENEFIT ESTIMATOR AS AN AID FOR DECISION MAKING IN RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT, DECOMMISSIONING AND REHABILITATION OF LAND

The paper introduces an auxiliary tool (Cost-Benefit Estimator (CBE)) for comparing options of land rehabilitation, radioactive waste management and disposal and other relevant applications. The CBE takes into consideration objective factors (projected and returned finances, probability of failures, projected time intervals for implementation of management steps, etc.) and subjective factors perceived by the public, decision makers, experts, interested and affected parties, etc. The subjective factors involve consequences of failures, mitigation chance and time if failure occurs, social impact in case of successful accomplishment of the projected action, etc.). These values, which can be quantified and input as statistical variables to address the associated uncertainties, are used for evaluation of various management options under consideration. The CBE (as well as the other quantities) of each option considered could be obtained in a form of statistical distribution and the comparison of the CBE results facilitates selection of an optimum option, acceptable to experts, the public and other interested parties. The input data could be obtained usually from the questionnaires developed for each particular group under question: a) The best judgement of the collected opinions by experts; b) Opinions by members of the public, who might be important for accepting the selected solution in the decision-making process; c) Opinions by other groups involved in decision-making process at various levels, etc.; The significance of the paper stems from the growing environmental awareness and increasing public involvement that have raised two questions with regard to rehabilitation of sites and management of radioactive wastes, respectively: “How clean is clean enough?” “How safe is safe enough?” The answer to these questions involves not only technical issues, which have been largely discussed up to now, but also social, economic, legal and regulatory issues. An optimum choice among several options should be sought, which is best acceptable from all or most viewpoints considered. The use of CBE facilitates such optimisation.