Analysis of the Financial Assurance Plan in the License Application for a Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility

Our purpose is to evaluate the efficiency of the financial assurance plan in the license application\u27 submitted by American Ecology Corporation (AEC) to site, design, and build a new technological facility in Boyd County, Nebraska, for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste (LLRW). Efficiency means the ability to accomplish desired effects. Thus, efficiency considerations begin with social beliefs and ethics in order to know what is desirable. Ethics can be considered a system of guidance designed to assist in living within a society. . . . That we must live together installs the positive requirement of doing good for one another (Anderson and Englehardt 2001, 6-7). Humans in a social system are immersed in obligation to one another (8). Ethics seeks to resolve the problems of what is harm and what is help and to unravel the complexities of moral choice (9). In a socioeconomic system, choices and decisions are about organizational actions. Action is behavior under the governance of some larger understanding . . . (9)