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Experience to date demonstrates that it remains challenging to engage experts and concerned citizens in a meaningful and mutually comprehensive dialogue on complex and technical risk-bearing projects. In search of an explanation we found Niklas Luhmann's interpretation of modern society very useful. Luhmann describes modern society as the aggregate of more or less self-sufficient functional subsystems becoming more and more isolated from each other in a spiral of progressive specialisation. With each system developing its own expectations, language, rationality and ways of observing and interpreting reality, communication between systems becomes progressively problematic; according to Luhmann, even impossible. Contrary to Luhmann, however, we consider communicating human beings (and not communication in itself) the constituting elements of society. From that perspective we see a connection with Ulrich Beck's thesis on modern society as an individualised risk society and his call for 'reflexive science and decision making'. We will use Beck's negotiation model to build communicative bridges between (Luhmann's) social (sub)systems, in particular, by engaging as many concerned parties as possible. Further, we will argue that the Belgian experience with the siting of a radioactive waste repository demonstrates that the creation of an environment in which experts and citizens can enter into dialogue as individuals, rather than as representatives of interests or (scientific) disciplines, can help bridge differences in the rationality and jargon of systems, and result in finding common ground.

As geological disposal (GD) of higher activity radioactive wastes seems to be moving towards implementation in some countries (most prominently perhaps in Finland and Sweden), this paper reflects on a number of governance questions this raises. We highlight the near long-term governance of such repositories (that is to say the process beginning with construction and finishing when closure is fully completed). This time period comes into view when the implementation process shifts from siting to hosting. The notion of hosting emphasises the relationship between the repository and its host community. A relationship that demands, we argue in this paper, a re-figuration of the geography and temporality of GD. Hosting a geological disposal facility brings with it specific sociotechnical challenges, i.e. problems which involve both social and technical adjustments, as well as reconfigurations of the boundary between them. In this paper, we discuss three such challenges, namely complexity (due to the changes in spatial organisation), residual risk (referring to events that are not accidents, but sub-critical in relation to hazards or anomalies in relation to expectations) and perpetual uncertainty (with respect to both scientific knowledge and societal decision-making). As such, the question of the long-term governance of geological repositories is not specific to the post-Fukushima era. However, we do see a strong link between this question and the question of the (long-term) governance of major accident sites, of which Fukushima figures as one of the most poignant examples, and which also face issues of complexity, residual risk and perpetual uncertainty.

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