We carry out our own public and stakeholder engagement (PSE) and scrutinise the PSE activities of other organisations involved in the management of higher activity radioactive wastes.
Importance of PSE
PSE is an important part of our work (see our Terms of Reference).
We use this engagement to collect evidence, gather your views and check the accuracy of our documents.
How we carry out our PSE
We meet with various groups of stakeholders, including Local Authorities, people living near nuclear sites, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), Governments, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, operators of nuclear sites and regulators.
Our plenary meetings are open to the public and we usually hold public meetings when we visit nuclear sites.
Scrutiny of others’ PSE
We have asked the UK, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Governments, the NDA and the regulators for information on their PSE. The questions cover PSE strategies, the types of PSE used and their effectiveness, and coordination of PSE, as well as general views.
We have also contacted nuclear site operators and Site Stakeholder Groups for responses and or comment. We will be publishing our conclusions on PSE in early 2011.
Providing information to the public about radioactive wastes management
We want information about radioactive waste management to be more accessible to the public. The DECC MRWS website and the NDA website both contain extensive information about radioactive waste management. We scrutinise developments on these websites and other ways that information is made available to the public.
Our 2009 interim storage and R&D (doc 2500) reports to Government made recommendations on the provision of information and we are monitoring the actions being taken in response.