Taking Risk Seriously: A Narrative Analysis of the Controversy Over Ontario Power Generation's Deep Geologic Repository

Abstract

Controversies over technologies with uncertain risks, such as deep geologic repositories (DGRs) for nuclear waste, are some of the most divisive current societies face. In their approach to policy controversies, Schön and Rein (1994) elaborate how communities of meaning frame issues in ways oriented to different underlying narratives. Cultural theorists of risk similarly observe that socio-cultural groups understand risk in diverse ways according with plural socio-technological worldviews. Yet while these divisions can seem intractable, it may be possible to develop pragmatic solutions to policy controversies by looking for broader “metanarratives” according to which plural policy narratives make sense simultaneously (Roe, 1994). Interpretive Policy Analysis (Yanow 2000) is used to anatomize the policy controversy around Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG’s) projected DGR represented in the public dialogue between OPG and a community action organization, Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump (STGLND). Intensity- and theory-driven coding of environmental review submissions, public relations documents, and media quotations found congruencies between these organizations’ discourses and Buss et al’s techno-optimistic Worldview A and techno-pessimistic Worldview B (1986). Underlying narratives was observed in OPG’s discourse on the capability of good geology identified by expert scientists to contain nuclear waste and in STGLND’s discourse concerning the vulnerability of water to contamination by nuclear waste and the need for ordinary citizens to protect it. Subsequently, Roe’s narrative policy analysis is used to coordinate these underlying narratives by means of a meta narrative that is entitled Responsible Geology and that reflects the prudent middle-ground attitude of some geologists that DGR is a viable approach to nuclear waste management but DGR siting entails more extensive, empirical, and publicly accountable forms of study. This name has deliberate echoes with the Responsible Innovation approach that aims to facilitate more constructive and courageous citizen oversight of technology development (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten, 2003).