Sci Eng Ethics DOI 10.1007/s11948-015-9650-4 ORIGINAL PAPER

Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste: A LongTerm Socio-Technical Experiment Jantine Schro¨der1,2

Received: 24 October 2014 / Accepted: 6 May 2015  Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract In this article we investigate whether long-term radioactive waste management by means of geological disposal can be understood as a social experiment. Geological disposal is a rather particular technology in the way it deals with the analytical and ethical complexities implied by the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation, because it is presented as a technology that ultimately functions without human involvement. We argue that, even when the long term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted to safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal is still a social experiment. In order to better understand this argument and explore how it could be addressed, we elaborate the idea of social experimentation with the notion of co-production and the analytical tools of delegation, prescription and network as developed by actornetwork theory. In doing so we emphasize that geological disposal inherently involves relations between surface and subsurface, between humans and nonhumans, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. In other words, we argue that geological disposal concurrently is a social and a technical experiment, or better, a long-term socio-technical experiment. We end with proposing the idea of ‘actor-networking’ as a sensitizing concept for future research into what geological disposal as a sociotechnical experiment could look like. Keywords Geological disposal
Radioactive waste management
Socio-technical experiments
Responsible innovation
Actor-network theory

& Jantine Schro¨der [email protected] 1

University of Antwerp (UA), Antwerp, Belgium

2

Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK-CEN), Mol, Belgium

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Introduction Geological disposal (GD) is a technology proposed to manage high-level, long-lived radioactive waste by containing and isolating it in the deep underground for as long as possible. Conceiving of this technology as a social experiment is not new. Authors such as Weinberg (1972, 1978) and van de Poel (2011) have for instance pointed out the inevitable uncertainties involved in long-term radioactive waste management (RWM), related to the lack of complete knowledge of chemical, physical and biological processes over time, and the impossibility of predicting how people in the far future will deal with geological repositories (van de Poel 2011, p. 286). Drawing on combined insights from the fields of technology assessment, responsible innovation and science and technology studies we will take this conception further by describing it thoroughly and exploring how it could be addressed. Our analysis is based on the discourse of what is casually referred to as the ‘international radwaste community’, focusing notably on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD-NEA) and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). These forums can be described as ‘international elites’ of RWM, as they gather leading scientists and policy makers and representatives of national implementers, regulators and nuclear research institutes in the field of radioactive waste management and radiation protection, and assist member countries by providing information, guidance and standards. In choosing these organisations, we follow Atkinson-Grosjean that, as international elites, they carry out international ideas which cause combinations of principled and causal beliefs to gain widespread currency and to become entrenched and translated as policy and practice (Atkinson-Grosjean 2002, 2006). We focus our analysis on a review of the international radwaste community’s discourse, ‘‘the aggregate of more or less complementary ensembles of ideas, concepts and categorisations that can be traced throughout certain discussions’’ (Korsten 2008, p. 15 (citing M. Hajer) (own translation)) as written down in conference and workshop proceedings, position papers and official guidelines and recommendations published between 1995 and 2014. We are aware of the fact that by choosing this sample, we may cover only one general, aggregated type of discourse that may lack strongly opposing views. Nevertheless, the discourse under scrutiny reveals internal tensions and ambiguities. And it is these indicators of complexity that we want to explore through the lens of social experimentation. It is not our aim to deliver a judgement about the desirability of GD as a technology for long-term RWM, nor to treat the issue of RWM as a whole. We take the proposal of GD as formulated by the international radwaste community as a starting point. Using the lens of social experimentation and combining this lens with insights notably from actor-network theory, firstly, we aim to describe this proposal thoroughly, and, secondly, we aim to explore the conditions for its successful unfolding. We thus hope to serve the double purpose of informing both the ongoing research and policy making on GD and the conceptual development of the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation.

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New Technologies as Social Experiments The Oxford English Dictionary defines an experiment as ‘‘a tentative procedure; a method, system of things, or course of action, adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose’’. Why we value this description will become clear shortly, but first we want to point out some specifications of this broad definition. A standard scientific experiment is defined as the testing of a hypothesis by means of deliberate observation in designed and controlled circumstances (van de Poel 2012). What stands out is the laboratory setting, which includes knowledge of boundary conditions, the controlled variation of parameters, arranged observation, and the embedding of this organised research process in a network of scientific institutions (Krohn and Weyer 1994, p. 175). This further implies that effects are contained in standard scientific experiments. What differentiates a standard scientific experiment from a technological experiment, is that the latter aims at developing useful artifacts or methods rather than ‘truth’, and thus ultimately serves the practice oriented demonstration of the functioning of a technology more than the theory oriented testing of the validity of a hypothesis (van de Poel 2012). Various authors from the fields of technology assessment and innovation studies have pointed out the difficulties of extrapolating laboratory research results to real life conditions, and the limitations of a view that clearly separates between knowledge production and application, between technology development and implementation, between process and product (e.g. Krohn and Weyer 1994; Hellstro¨m 2003; Stirling 2008; von Schomberg 2013; Owen et al. 2013). Although relative to the level of complexity of the technological system and the scale of its diffusion, it is true for the development and implementation of all technologies, from coffee machines to genetically modified organisms, that, outside the laboratory, knowledge of boundary conditions, control over parameter variation and institutional observation capacities diminish, and variation, uncertainty and ignorance increase. Nevertheless it has been argued that ‘‘most of the tests of modern technology are only possible if the technologies are released in real scale, because the data gathered from pilot plants or small field trials are not sufficient’’ to fully demonstrate their functioning (Weyer 1995). Indeterminacy thus is, in a sense, inherent in innovation (Wynne 1992): unless one is able to build a full-scale prototype and to test it under all the precise natural, material and social contexts and conditions that could be encountered in practice, there is always the uncertainty and ignorance of extrapolating laboratory results to new and untried circumstances (Weinberg 1992). Following this reasoning, Krohn and Weyer point out that for many technologies implementation does not come after but before verification, which they refer to as ‘‘experimental implementation’’ (Krohn and Weyer 1994, p. 173). Highlighting the necessity and consequences of elaborating laboratory boundaries to society as such led to the proposal to describe the development of new technologies as social experiments. This perspective also highlights the boundaries of foresight and the limits of control, notably in light of the complexity of man– machine interactions and interdependencies (think for instance about the internet, or

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about developments within the field of genetics (e.g. van Hoyweghen and Verschraegen 2014)). When technologies are transferred from the laboratory level to the societal level, or when a scaling up or a transfer to other social contexts takes place, the complexity of reality inevitably exceeds that of the designers’ model (Weyer 1995, see also Elam 2014). This entails a degree of ‘moral luck’ in innovation: ‘‘burdened with imperfect foresight, we take a chance, hoping to be excused from moral blame if it can be demonstrated that the future consequences of our actions at the time could not have been ‘reasonably foreseen’’’ (Owen et al. 2013, p. 28). Apart from the issue of limited foresight and controllability, van de Poel describes social experiments as different from standard scientific experiments in at least two other respects: they are not always acknowledged as experiments, so that data gathering or monitoring is not only challenging but often simply lacking, and they include a variety of end users and bystanders that may not even be aware of being involved in an experiment or of the potential hazards imposed (van de Poel 2011, p. 287). Following these three characteristics, social experiments are described as trialling not only with potential hazards and benefits, but also with social institutions and values for dealing with the new technologies (van de Poel 2012). Acknowledging the experimental character of technological innovation and defining an experiment as to include not only the epistemological (‘‘method’’) but also the natural and material (‘‘things’’) and the social realm (‘‘action’’), as the Oxford Dictionary definition so aptly does, reveals a challenging complexity, not only in an analytical but also in an ethical sense. A variety of means to deal with this complexity has been proposed within the field of technology assessment and responsible innovation, including anticipation, inclusive deliberation and adaptability (see e.g. Schot and Rip 1997; von Schomberg 2013; Owen et al. 2013). Another approach is to reduce complexity to the degree possible by means of simplifying system architectures (Weyer 1995; Perin 1998). We argue that the longterm RWM technology of GD as proposed by the international radwaste community offers a rather outstanding effort to pursue the latter approach. In the next section we will substantiate this argument and outline some of the tensions and ambiguities it contains.

Geological Disposal as a Social Experiment Introducing the Technology of Geological Disposal Nuclear reactor technology has become a textbook case to highlight the earlier described complexities of technological innovation as experimental implementation, notably due to its disaster potential and the high-level, long-lived hazardous waste it produces (see e.g. Beck 1992; van de Poel 2011; Taebi 2012). We will focus on the latter, not so much as an ‘externality’ of nuclear applications, but as a field of innovation on its own. What makes RWM an interesting case study is that, in light of its hazardous nature, risks are not only the possible results but the given point of departure of innovation: the waste is there, making its management

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inevitable and the principle desirability of innovation incontestable. Moreover, in light of its long-lived nature, innovation not only has to be conceived within the boundaries of current society, but in many societies to come. Completely recycling or destroying this hazardous waste is impossible1 and diluting and dispersing it all into the environment is too risky. Therefore RWM research and practice are focused on technologies to concentrate, contain and isolate it at distance from man and his environment. The good news is that containment of these hazardous substances indeed is possible, the bad news is that, unless getting rid of them will 1 day turn out to be possible after all, they have to remain in isolation ‘forever’.2 Following this reasoning, GD has been the preferred option for the long-term management of high-level, long-lived waste among the international radwaste community already since the 1960s (Forsstro¨m and Taylor in IAEA 2000, p. 39) and today consensus exists that the Research, Development and Demonstration (RD&D) is mature enough and that the time is right to move towards the implementation phase (IAEA 2012). The general idea of GD is to construct a facility some hundred metres underground in a stable geological layer, to fill it up with waste packages, to backfill the galleries and shafts, and, ultimately, to close and seal the repository (IAEA 2003, p. 3) (see Fig. 1). Repositories are thus designed with the aim of letting radioactive decay take place naturally over time, and to have any release from the artificial barriers of the waste packaging and underground installation be delayed and further diluted by geological host formations selected for this function (such as clay, granite or salt) (OECD-NEA and ICRP 2013) (see Fig. 2). GD is explicitly defined as a permanent and final solution, the RWM end-point (OECD-NEA 1995, p. 12; OECD-NEA 2008, p. 3). In differentiation of the currently applied approach of actively maintained and controlled surface storage, the actual functioning of the technology of GD is said to be ‘‘performed after its closure’’ (IAEA 2006, p. 61). The central characteristic of a functioning GD is that it promises passive safety, generally referring to protection without human action (Forsberg and Weinberg 1990; IAEA 2007; World Nuclear Association 2013): ‘‘the disposal facility is to be seen as a functional facility whose controls are in-built and whose safety, after facility closure, does not rely on the presence of man’’ (ICRP 2011, p. 9).

1

Research into advanced fuel cycles which would include the partitioning, recycling and burning of radioactive waste is ongoing, but there is no consensus about foresights of reaching decisively high degrees of efficiency (see e.g. Schro¨der 2015).

2

The time of hazard is referred to as the time required for radioactive decay to have taken place to such a degree that it no longer poses a threat to human health. This involves a complex assessment, but we justify our use of the words ‘forever’ or ‘permanent’ in this regard based on the rudimentary rule of thumb of isotope half-life multiplied by 10: e.g. for Pu-239 alone this would result in 240,000 years, for I-129 in 160 million years.

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Fig. 1 An impression of what GD could look like (Source: Verhoef et al. 2011)

Fig. 2 GD as a passive multibarrier system (Source: NIRAS/ ONDRAF) [www.niras.be/ content/veiligheidsfuncties-oplange-termijn]

Avoiding Experimental Complexity In sect. New Technologies as Social Experiments we described the general finding that when technological innovations move from the laboratory to the ‘the real world’, knowledge of boundary conditions, control over parameter variation, institutional observation capacities and the containment of effects diminish, and variation, uncertainty, ignorance and the dissemination of effects increase. Against this background of limited foresight and controllability, the difficulty or lack of monitoring, and the inclusion of a variety of (unaware) end users and bystanders, the notion of social experimentation highlights analytical and ethical complexity.

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Obviously, for the case of RWM, the enormous timescales and the inherently risky nature strongly intensify this complexity. Emphasizing an ethical obligation not to pass undue burdens to generations that did not receive the benefits that created these burdens (IAEA 1995, p. 7; IAEA 2003, p. 1; ICRP 2013, p. 41), the international radwaste community has nevertheless set it as its task to design a final technology that will be functional for hundreds of thousands of years.3 In the way it addresses this seemingly impossible challenge, we can identify how two major simplification strategies are invoked. As a first strategy, the most stable, unchanging environment over time is to be sought: the steadiest layers in the deep underground are selected to constitute ‘the real world’ in which the geological disposal facility is to function. Geologists indeed commonly work with million year time scales,4 comparable to the half-lives of some of the long-lived radioisotopes under consideration. Furthermore, the steadiest and least interactive materials are to be deployed to construct the artificial barriers of the repository. Backfilling is foreseen to serve engineering stability and the creation of an anaerobic environment to further avoid chemo-physical dynamics (e.g. ventilation, drainage). An enormous amount of research is invested in characterizing the system’s functioning, by means of laboratory experiments (among others in underground research laboratories5), reference to natural analogues and computer modelling.6 The following citation of Belgian and French RWM actors further illustrates how the international radwaste community’s way of dealing with complexity gets translated into a policy that pushes the simplification of the disposal system architecture: As far as possible, simplicity of design should be sought so that the evolution of the components can be assessed based on sound knowledge of the data and of the underlying processes. […] The application of the principle of demonstrability means reducing the possibility for process coupling, limiting, as much as possible, the factors affecting system evolution and the various contrasts and imbalances […] and working in conditions in which the features, events and processes to be taken into account are clear and straightforward. In this way, the number of key parameters is reduced and simpler models can be used (FANC/AFCN et al. 2004, p. 13 & 15). 3

Certainly other motivations, such as commercial interests—which are served by a ‘permanent solution’ for the waste issue in order to justify the continued production of nuclear energy—are at play next to ethical considerations. But as indicated earlier, in this article we make an analytical separation between the production of radioactive waste on the one hand and its management on the other.

4

Be it, admittedly, in a retrospective more than a prospective manner.

5

See for instance www.euridice.be or www.mont-terri.ch.

6

Just to give an indication, we list some of the GD research projects conducted under the Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2013) of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) (see cordis.europa.eu/fp7/euratom-fission/about-geological_en.html for further information): SKIN—Slow processes in close-to-equilibrium conditions for radionuclides in water/solid systems of relevance to nuclear waste management; RECOSY—Redox phenomena controlling systems; REDUPP—Reducing Uncertainty in Performance Prediction; CROCK—Crystalline rock retention processes; CATCLAY— Processes of Cation Migration in Clayrocks; BELBAR—Bentonite Erosion: effects on the Long term performance of the engineered Barrier and Radionuclide Transport; FORGE—Fate of repository gases; DOPAS—Full Scale Demonstration of Plugs and Seals.

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In short, the ‘real world environment’ in which the technology of GD is to function is sought and designed as to reproduce ideal laboratory conditions to the degree possible, where knowledge of boundary conditions, control over parameter variation and the containment of effects are most pursuable, which in turn maximizes foresight and control and minimizes the impact of the difficulty or lack of monitoring. In line with the first, the second strategy to deal with experimental complexity is to look for an environment where the fickle variable of human action has to be taken into account as little as possible. This is indeed argued for both from an ethical and an analytical viewpoint, as illustrated by the following citations: […]our responsibilities to future generations are better discharged by a strategy of final disposal than by reliance on stores which require surveillance, bequeath long-term responsibilities of care, and may in due course be neglected by future societies whose structural stability should not be presumed (OECD-NEA 1995, p. 5). With respect to the presentation of a body of convincing arguments, the principle of demonstrability assumes that the performances expected from the safety functions are based on a passive system (FANC/AFCN et al. 2004, p. 15). On the surface reality is dynamic and ever changing, not only naturally (including extreme events such as tsunamis), but also socially (including ‘extreme events’ such as wars). As highlighted by the international radwaste community, this is deemed to be much less the case in the deep underground: ‘‘At great distance from the surface, changes are particularly slow’’ (ICRP 2013, p. 13) and ‘‘The location of the disposal facility, deep underground, isolated from the environment that humans normally inhabit and in a geological environment with no exploitable resources, together with its technical design, provide protection against human intrusion’’ (Ibidem, p. 34). In short, the second strategy can be described as the ‘elimination’ of end users (a GD facility is not ‘operated’ or ‘used’, strictly speaking) and even bystanders (by making them ‘farstanders’). This would minimize the impossible task of forecasting human behaviour and of capturing man–machine interfaces over time, and it may not fully avoid the issue of unaware experimental subjects over time, but at least it would reduce the implied risk and moral burden. Behind the international rad waste community’s long-term RWM discourse of GD relying on materials and nature and not on humans (the system of passive barriers), we can thus discern an interesting mixture of simultaneously acknowledging and denying the complexity of experimentation. The complexity of technical experimentation is acknowledged but muzzled by locating the technology in a ‘real world environment’ that almost equals a laboratory environment. The complexity of social experimentation is acknowledged but muzzled by disregarding humans as part of the functioning of the technology. Synthesized, the approach can thus be said to portray a divorce of surface (the area of unpredictable human activity and social time) from subsurface (the nonhuman area of predictable geological passivity and deep time), to allow ‘‘a containment strategy that presents geological depth as a

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permanent externality’’ (Krupar 2012, p. 307). Based on an enormous amount of dedicated physics, chemistry and engineering research conducted during the past decades, the international radwaste community today is of the opinion that the safety case7 for GD is complete and mature enough to proceed to implementation. Acknowledging Experimental Complexity However, if we dig deeper into the international radwaste community’s discourse, we find quite some reservations or caution with regard to the suppression of experimental complexity the proposed shift from the research to the implementation phase may seem to imply. The OECD-NEA for instance states that although ‘‘designs are generally chosen for their long-term stability and predictability […] there are practical limitations as to how long anything meaningful can be said about the protection provided by any system against the hazard’’ (OECD-NEA 2007, p. 66). The organisation’s members moreover point out that ‘‘it is axiomatic that physical evidence, even when it can be related to a long-term geologic history, cannot alone provide definitive answers about any disposal system’s ability to isolate wastes over hundreds of thousands of years into the future’’ (Ibidem, p. 11). The ICRP members elaborate these statements by more explicitly referring to ‘man–machine’ interfaces: ‘‘In the distant future, the geosphere and the engineered system and, even more, the biosphere will evolve in a less predictable way’’ (ICRP 2011, p. 6) and ‘‘A change in the environment or in the use of the environment may open new or enhanced pathways from the source to man’’ (ICRP 1997, p. 10). In all, this leads the ICRP members to conclude that long-term risk calculations are unreliable (Ibidem, p. 11) and that the role of such estimations is to provide an indication or illustration rather than a prediction of the robustness of the disposal system (Ibidem, p. 29). At the national level, these limits of the scientific basis for generally assessing a GD system in the future are reluctantly acknowledged, for instance by radioactive waste management agencies, as making life more difficult for everybody—developer, regulator, general public, communicators, politicians, … (De Preter et al. 2012). The radwaste community’s discourse seems to emphasize that GD is a RWM option that does not rely upon or does not require human action, but a closer reading reveals that passivity is not only a goal, an end point, but also as a basic assumption, a starting point: means and ends are intertwined (Kroes and Meijers 2006). Being closed and staying closed,8 what we could refer to as the hypothesis of nondisturbance, is essential to uphold the designed long-term functioning of a GD. As such, GD seems to contain an ambiguous template, simultaneously displaying 7

‘‘A safety case demonstrates safety by providing a clear reasoning based on sound scientific and technological principles. […] The safety case is a major set of efforts to achieve the approval of a license application for a specific nuclear waste disposal facility and has to comply with the requirements set up by the national authorities’’ (IGD-TP 2011, p. 25).

8

Again, we do not deny that the desirability of this end state in itself may be debatable. For a discussion that goes in this direction, see e.g. Andre´n 2012; Taebi 2012. As explained in the introduction, however, we take this goal as a ‘given’: it is our aim to describe the proposal of GD and to evaluate conditions of its implementation, not to discuss RWM as a whole.

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distrust and trust in human behaviour: trusting the material and the natural realm over the social realm equals trusting the latter not to interfere with the former. The international radwaste community responds to this tension by taking only inadvertent (i.e. accidental) intrusion into consideration and attributing it a low probability (cf. Section Avoiding Experimental Complexity). If advertent intrusion is mentioned, the main message is that ‘‘it is considered out of the scope of responsibility of the current generation to protect a deliberate intruder, i.e. a person who is aware of the nature of the facility’’ (ICRP 2011, pp. 24–25). This position again reveals a hypothesis, namely that a deliberate intruder will be a knowledgeable intruder. It can be concluded that full-fledged demonstration of GD is inherently impossible. Given the novel nature of the technology and the enormous timescales involved, the passively protective functioning of geological disposal is bound to remain a hypothesis, formulated and explored with outstanding consideration, but nevertheless empirically untestable (InSOTEC 2014, p. 11). Highlighting that we cannot and should not rely on the social realm over time, the international radwaste community ultimately delegates the successful unfolding of the experiment to the material and natural realm. But in order to do so, in addition to hypotheses about these realms it also has to make hypotheses about the social realm, about the limited likelihood of accidental intrusions and the knowledgeable nature of deliberate intruders. In sum, despite the international radwaste community’s effort to maximize foresight and control and to minimize human involvement, GD can indeed be labelled as a social experiment.

Geological Disposal as A Socio-Technical Experiment Throughout the previous sections we have outlined the motivations as well as the ambiguities of what Bloomfield and Vurdubakis refer to as GD’s ‘‘narrative of leaving the social world behind’’ (2005, p. 738). It seems that a tough case like GD concurrently emphasizes and complicates the need to address the complexities of experimental implementation, and that relying on the social realm is as challenging as relying on the natural and the material realm. To better comprehend what this means and how we can deal with it, we turn to the field of STS (or STIS, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies), where scholars aim precisely at developing a capacity to better understand ‘‘how it is that people and technologies work together, shape one another, hold one another in place’’ (Bijker and Law 1992, p. 306). We draw on the notion of co-production (as developed by authors such as Sheila Jasanoff (e.g. 2004)) as an overarching framework which outlines how ‘‘part of the work of successful technoscience is the construction not only of facts and artifacts but also of the societies that accept, use and validate them’’ (Sismondo in Hackett et al. 2008, p. 17). But we will notably draw on actor-network theory (ANT), as developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Madelaine Akrich and John Law. We choose this framework in light of its relevance for our case of GD which, as will become clear shortly, follows from the fact that ANT elaborates or specifies the framework of co-production by seeing technologies as heterogeneous networks

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consisting of both human and nonhumans actors (collectively captured by the notion of ‘actants’). The material and natural realm and the social realm are thus treated in an anti-dualist manner, and their functioning as a combined endeavour which none of the participating actants could perform alone. Delegation We earlier explained how, by proposing the passively functioning technology of GD, the international radwaste community ultimately aims to transfer the job of containing and isolating radioactive waste presently maintained and monitored within the social realm (on the surface) to the material and natural realm (in the underground). In the description we read that GD’s controls are in-built, after closure its safety does not rely on the presence of man (ICRP 2011, p. 9), it does not require active surveillance or care and thus offers a method to discharge our responsibilities to future generations (OECD-NEA 1995, p. 5, own italics). This description seems to resonate remarkably well with what is referred in ANT as delegation: assigning and entrusting what a human does to be performed by a nonhuman (Latour in Bijker and Law 1992, p. 229). Latour explains how we have a choice to either try to discipline people or to use, as a substitute for unreliable humans, a delegated nonhuman character (in our case a passive multi-barrier system) with a single function (here, containing and isolating radioactive waste) (Ibidem, p. 231, own additions in between brackets). This way, Latour continues, you only have to discipline a couple of nonhumans (artificial barriers, geological layers) and may safely leave the others (the people on the surface) to their erratic behaviour (Idem). In other words, the idea is to have nonhumans do the job in place of humans (Ibidem, p. 245), which tallies with the international radwaste community’s promotion of passive safety in light of the unjustifiability (to ‘‘bequeath long-term responsibilities of care’’ (OECD-NEA 1995, p. 5)) and unreliability (‘‘future societies whose structural stability should not be presumed’’ (Idem)) of longterm active care. In ANT reference is also made to the timeframes that are so relevant for our case of GD. Acts of delegation can be described as attempts to devise arrangements that will outlast the immediate attention of the people that created them, as trying ‘‘to find ways of ensuring that things will stay in one place once those who initiated them have gone away’’ (Bijker and Law 1992, p. 294). Very often delegation comes down to trying to find ways of doing things simply (Idem), which also echoes what we described GD to aim for: reducing complexity to the degree possible by means of a simple system architecture. The idea of delegation is indeed that it is simpler to delegate certain actions to an artifact than to continuously have these actions carried out by humans. ‘‘Simpler, but not very simple’’, however (Idem). Prescription Importantly, and this is where the discourse of the international radwaste community is ambiguous (cf. sect. Acknowledging Experimental Complexity) and the relevance of the social experimentation lens is clear, the notion of

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delegation is inextricably coupled with that of prescription: ‘‘the behaviour imposed back onto the human by nonhuman delegates’’ which is also referred to as moral delegation: nonhumans silently tell us ‘‘do this, do that, behave this way, don’t go that way, you may do so, be allowed to go there, …’’ (Latour in Bijker and Law 1992, p. 232). In other words, moral delegation refers to what a device prescribes the anticipated actors to do; both negative (what it forbids) and positive (what it permits) (Akrich and Latour in Bijker and Law 1992, p. 261). GD’s strategy of simplification can only work if the divorce between surface and subsurface is sustainably respected by both nonhumans (delegation) and humans (prescription). Taking the idea of prescription further, it becomes clear why delegation makes life simpler, but not very simple. In delegating actions or purposes to technologies, we allow a certain degree of human deskilling (e.g. people do not have to remember to actively look after the radioactive waste and invest further resources into it). But we also demand a certain reskilling, namely for humans to become proper ‘users’ of the technology, for humans to live with the technologies in a functional way (e.g. not to use the waste or the deep underground for something else or in a wrong way) (Latour in Bijker and Law 1992, p. 232, own additions in between brackets). The result of such a ‘‘distribution of competences’’ between humans and nonhumans is that competent humans can ‘work’ with the nonhuman, but others, unaware of the prescriptions of the technology, may get in trouble (Ibidem, p. 233). Latour here gives the example of an automatically closing door. The advantage is that you are sure that the cold stays out without having to remind yourself and others about having to close the door, or without having to pay a porter to take care of this job for you. But the consequence is that you, as a user, need to adapt your behaviour to the technology, e.g. by moving fast enough to avoid a bleeding nose or losing your trolley (Latour in Bijker and Law 1992, p. 232). Actor Networks The N in ANT can be seen as the connector between delegation and prescription. It relates back to the idea of co-production, arguing that technological innovation is not only about the construction of artifacts but also of the societies in which these artifacts are to function. Humans and nonhumans always interact within collectives, which is why Latour describes technologies not as objects but as institutions (Latour 1994, p. 49) (‘‘B-52s do not fly, the U.S. Air Force flies’’ (Latour 1994, p. 35)). Latour explains how ‘‘technical objects are stabilized by ‘enrolling’ a heterogeneous crowd of actants into a network of associations that stabilize the technical object’’ (Knorr Cetina citing Latour in Jasanoff 2004, p. 159). Delegation is an interactional notion, a process that needs to be sustained, not only by the ‘delegated’ (the repository needs to continue its job of isolation and containment) but also by the ‘delegator’ and its descendants (people need to continue to support the technology of GD). ‘‘Nonhumans are not so reliable that the irreversibility we would like to grant them is always complete’’ (Latour in Bijker and Law, 1992, p. 235). In other words: there is no such thing as ‘full delegation’, technologies need to be kept in place, which entails that both nonhumans and humans need to keep up their alignment.

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Particularly relevant for our case of GD, Latour highlights that although it is often presented the other way around, in order to move from fiction to project, from project to pilot, and from pilot to functioning technology, ever more people are required (Latour 1994, p. 49). Solid form cannot be given to technological projects without the support and cooperation of an entire series of ‘allies’, a complex network of human and nonhuman actors is needed (Bucchi 2004, p. 71). If one part of the chain is broken, the whole system may fall apart.

Addressing Geological Disposal as a Socio-Technical Experiment? Latour’s example of automatic doors (similar ones can be found on speed bumps (Latour, 1994) and heavy hotel key holders (Latour, 1991)) is particularly straightforward. But GD as proposed by the international radwaste community also is a clear cut example of delegation and prescription: you cannot have one without the other. The discourse involves relying on actions (isolating and containing radioactive waste) delegated to nonhumans (the underground multibarrier system) that in the future will make us do or refrain from things (intruding, doing something else with the underground or the waste, …) on behalf of others who are no longer here and that we have not elected (Latour 1994, p. 40). Highlighting GD as a final, passive technology (sects. Introducing the Technology of Geological Disposal and Avoiding Experimental Complexity), we argue that the international radwaste community is very explicit about delegation, but implicit and vague about prescription (the hypotheses about the limited likelihood of accidental intrusions and the knowledgeable nature of deliberate intruders (sect. Acknowledging Experimental Complexity)) and silent about networking. Viewing GD as a social experiment has the value of highlighting the importance of being explicit and deliberate about prescription: it brings forward the relevance of the social, human realm in contrast with the largely technical, nonhuman description of the technology by the international radwaste community. With the notion of network, ANT additionally highlights the link between both: the constitutive coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) between the social and the technical, between humans and nonhumans, between prescription and delegation. To better indicate why this is relevant, we may look at three general guidelines for responsible social experimentation proposed by van de Poel: (1) competent engineering and management of technology; (2) democratic decision-making and legitimation; and (3) distributive justice (van de Poel 2011, p. 289).9 The interpretation and sustainable realization of these guidelines is challenging for our case of GD. Can we make sense of competent engineering and technology management for a technology that is meant to function for thousands of years, of 9

Van de Poel concretizes these guidelines with a list of 13 possible conditions for responsible innovation. Although it would be interesting to evaluate all these conditions for the case of GD, this falls beyond the scope and the aim of this paper. We also follow van de Poel when he notes that ‘‘More important than the exact conditions is that a list like Table 1 draws attention to at least three aspects of responsible experimentation’’ (van de Poel 2011, pp. 288–289).

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democratic decision-making in a trans-generational context, and of distributive justice for a case of eternally disposing hazardous waste at a particular site? We propose to combine the idea of social experimentation with insights from ANT, not because the latter provides a ready-made answer to the questions just posed, but because the notion of ‘actor-network’ provides an analytical aid. ANT highlights that the three guidelines related to technology, democracy and justice need to be elaborated and evaluated in interaction: they are co-dependent for their meaning, bearing and relevance (see also Barthe et al. 2014). The active functioning of social institutions cannot be guaranteed for hundreds of thousands of years. Just as the passive functioning of a geological repository cannot be guaranteed over hundreds of thousands of years. Both equally contribute to what actor networking is about. This is why we prefer the notion of socio-technical experimentation over that of social experimentation. It triggers reflexivity with regard to the complexity of maintaining an actor network, an alignment between humans and nonhumans. Latour in this regard states that research is best seen ‘‘as a collective experimentation about what humans and nonhumans together are able to swallow or to withstand’’ (Latour 1999, p. 20) and John Law talks about innovation as ‘‘heterogeneous engineering’’ (Law 1987, p. 113). Combining the insights from of social experimentation with ANT allows us to better understand van de Poel’s (2012) definition of innovation mentioned in sect. New Technologies as Social Experiments, describing it as trialling not only with potential hazards and benefits, but also with institutions (which we can now read in a Latourian sense) for dealing with the new technologies. We do not argue that the challenges of dealing with experimental complexity are overcome by invoking ANT. The framework does not offer a readymade checklist of conditions for socio-technical experimentation. In fact, ANT has repeatedly been criticised for remaining purely descriptive (‘‘examining only the strength and not the character of alliances’’ (Amsterdamska 1990, p. 502; Fuller 2000; Jasanoff 2004, p. 23). To this we may add that ANT has notably been developed based on historical case studies (i.e. in hindsight). The (sensibleness of the) question of what a ‘good’ network could or should look like for an emergent technology such as GD thus clearly deserves further attention, and to this aim we argue that research on social experimentation and the framework of ANT can reinforce each other. We therefore propose the notion of actor-network as a ‘sensitizing concept’, i.e. a general notion that is not yet or scantily elaborated for the context of GD, but despite its lack of specification suggests directions along which to look by indicating a general sense of what is relevant (Mortelmans 2007, p. 114–115; van den Hoonaard 1997).

Conclusions In this article we investigated whether the technology of geological disposal for the longterm management of radioactive waste can be understood as a social experiment. We started by introducing new technologies as experiments (sect. New Technologies as Social Experiments): the verification of technologies’ functioning does not occur before, but during implementation. Such verification is complex, because when technological innovations move from the laboratory to the ‘the real world’, knowledge of boundary

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conditions, control over parameter variation, institutional observation capacities and the containment of effects diminish, and variation, uncertainty, ignorance and the dissemination of effects increase. Against this background of limited foresight and controllability, the difficulty or lack of monitoring, and the inclusion of a variety of (unaware) end users and bystanders, the notion of social experimentation highlights analytical and ethical complexity. After having introduced the technology of GD (sect. Introducing the Technology of Geological Disposal), we explained how the international radwaste community simultaneously acknowledges and denies this complexity in its GD proposal (sect. Avoiding Experimental Complexity). The complexity of technical experimentation is acknowledged but muzzled by locating the technology in an isolated ‘real world environment’ that almost equals a laboratory environment. The complexity of social experimentation is acknowledged but muzzled by disregarding humans as part of the functioning of the technology. We then portrayed how this strategy to avoid experimental complexity (by demarcating surface from subsurface, the human from the nonhuman realm) nevertheless reveals ambiguities and internal tensions in the international radwaste communities discourse, which ultimately confirm the experimental character of not only the technical but also the social functioning of the GD strategy. We concluded that, in light of the long-term hazardous nature of radioactive waste, a tough case like GD concurrently emphasizes and complicates the need to address the complexities of experimental implementation, and that relying on the social realm is as challenging as relying on the natural and the material realm. To better understand this finding and explore its implications, we proposed to elaborate the lens of social experimentation by applying the STS frameworks of coproduction and ANT to GD (sect. Geological Disposal as A Socio-Technical Experiment). ANT rejects a dualistic boundary drawing between the material and the natural realm and the social realm. With the interconnected analytical tools of prescription, delegation and network, it highlights that innovation is best seen as a collective experimentation about what technology and society together are able to coproduce (Latour 1999). We thus argued that, even when the long-term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted to safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal inherently involves relations between humans and nonhumans, between surface and subsurface, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. Using the notion of ‘sociotechnical experimentation’ (where ‘‘the distinction between the inside and the outside of the laboratory had disappeared’’ (Latour 2004)) and echoing the idea of ‘moral luck’ as introduced in sect. New Technologies as Social Experiments, Latour writes: ‘‘Care and caution go together with risk taking. Nothing surprising in that, nothing out of the ordinary. What is really extraordinary, what is really baffling, is that modernist experts could have imagined […] the totally implausible idea that, once knowledge had determined plans and objects, then realisation would ensue without care and caution being necessary any more’’ (Idem). In sum, we did not use the lens of social experimentation to discuss the desirability of the proposed end state of final, passive geological in this article, but, together with ANT, it did bring forward that reaching and sustaining this end state should not be taken for granted, as something that will happen simply because the technical design of GD is ultimately intended to reach this end state. As the

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experiment unfolds, nonhumans and humans, the ‘technical’ and the ‘social’ will collectively have to remain a functioning network. Some authors, including Latour, take this tread of socio-technical networks further, from the analytical and the ethical sphere to the ontological sphere if you like. Taking examples such as global warming, genetically modified organisms and space debris, they emphasize that boundary drawing between the social and the technical, between the material, the natural and the social realm; ‘‘the dream of purity’’ (Bauman 1997) has become obsolete. ‘‘The laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet (Latour 2004), not a single space is left untouched by human interference. Therefore, narratives that speak about the natural and the material on the one hand and the social on the other have lost their relevance—new ones need to be developed (van Wyck 2015, working with the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’ (see also Latour 2015)). Proposing actor networking (or actantnetworking) as a sensitizing concept, we believe that the technology of GD, exactly because it emphasizes the traditional boundary drawing between ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’, between human and nonhuman, between surface and subsurface so firmly, offers an inspiring platform to conduct such research as to experiment with more holistic understandings of technological innovation. Acknowledgments This article was inspired by work conducted within the InSOTEC project, cosupported by the European Atomic Energy Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007/ 2011) [Grant Number 269906]. The author wishes to thank Michiel Van Oudheusen, Anne Bergmans, Catrinel Turcanu and Ilse Loots as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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