High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent fuel as Matters of Care: Assembling Neglected Things for their Futures. Final Results of the ONDRAF/NIRAS project - ULiège, UA and UMaastricht

This project highlighted how the current assessment of B&C waste program and its future is not only a matter of facts, it is also a matter of concerns (Latour 2004) and for some actors, clearly matter of care (de la Bellacasa 2011).
B&C waste and spent fuel have a social life: how to manage such radioactive materials is not only a matter of established facts but it is also a matter of interests, a ‘matter of concerns’. They are indeed intimately interrelated: ‘Matters of facts are processes of entangled concerns’ (De La Bellacasa, 2011, p.89). Concerns attach and hold together matters of fact and contribute to affirming their reality by adding further articulations’ (id.)
ONDRAF/NIRAS, like each actor involved in the management program, produce ‘matters of concerns’ strongly entangled with its matter of facts.
In some case, things can be more than interrelated matters of facts and concerns: they are ‘matters of care’. But what does it mean exactly? In any situation, if we ask yourselves: ‘is it a fact?’, ‘Am I concerned?’ or ‘do I care?’, our practices, our discourses and our engagement on an issue differ (de la Bellacasa 2011). Applied to B&C waste and spent fuel, it could be ‘waste are already here and it must be managed’ versus ‘I’m concerned by the faith of such radioactive materials’ versus ‘I care about the way to handle them’.
Then, considering the B&C waste as matters of care changes the way we are engaged in the program and the way we frame it.