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Abstract
Behnam Taebi and Jan Leen Kloosterman,
To Recycle or Not to Recycle? An Intergenerational Approach to Nuclear Fuel Cycles,
Science and Engineering Ethics, 2007.
This paper approached the choice between the open and closed nuclear fuel cycles as a matter
of intergenerational justice, by revealing the value conflicts in the production of nuclear
energy. The closed fuel cycle improve systainability in terms of the supply certainty of
uranium and involves less long-term radiological risks and proliferation concerns. However,
it compromises short-term public health and safety and security, due to the separaton of plutonium.
The trade-offs in nuclear energy are reducible to a chief trade-off between the present and the
future. To what extent should we take care of our produced nuclear waste and to what
extent should we accept additional risks to the present generation, in order to diminish the
exposure of future generation to those risks? The advocates of the open fuel cycle should explain
why they are willing to transfer all the risks for a very long period of time (200,000 years) to
future generations. In addition, supporters of the closed fuel cycle should underpin their
acceptance of additional risks to the present generation and make the actual reduction of risk
to the future plausible.
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