The Forgotten Impacts of Waste Disposal and Intergenerational Justice

Abstract

Energy justice is becoming the major issue for the future sustainability of communities around the globe. The energy footprint is a key issue in sustainability and climate change policies. Its related policy cousin, environmental justice gained momentum in the 1970–1980s in the United States and Europe separate from the modern environmental movement. While environmental justice has had trouble defining how to determine disproportionate impact from environmental contamination, energy justice has focused more on generation and consumption rather than its consequences from production. The prevailing three-tenet framework of energy justice which has shaped the current discourse is based on the distributional, procedural, and recognition justice (Lee and Byrne, 2019; Walker and Day, 2012; McCauley et al., 2013). However, the role of wastes, a lesson from the modern environmental movement of the 1960s seems to have been forgotten. For instance, renewable energy transitions are essential for decarbonizing the world economy and mitigating global climate change. Yet many energy technologies classified as renewable have human health implications that jeopardize the lives and wellbeing of those already most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Levenda, et al., 2021). Energy justice often looks at the front end of distributional impacts and access to energy consumption and distribution, yet neglects to link to the waste generation and disposal impacts from energy production and distribution (Fujiwara, 2020; Juntunen and Martiskainen, 2021). The energy justice literature emphasizes both the normative need for fairness and justice in energy decision-making, with procedural justice for siting generation facilities (Bell, 2020). However, the issues associated with waste disposal and decommissioning energy sites particularly in the nuclear energy industry, water wastes from fracking for natural gas, and the fossil fuel mining like mountain-top-removal extraction are not included in energy justice (Boechers, 2019; Jamal and Hales, 2016). This chapter begins with issues related to energy consumption and generation but quickly turns its focus to the negative externalities that are often not included in discussions of energy justice, which focuses on who bears the burden of the waste? The cases of permanent damage from past practices of mountain-top-removal and current practices of nuclear energy with high-level radioactive waste disposal are examined in several countries using the framework of energy justice (Bergman, et al. 2015). Finally, the authors challenge the notion of nuclear energy which has recently been proposed as a source of carbon-neutral option that will not impact climate change. The limited focus on waste generated during energy production is challenged due to looking at only the climate change impacts rather than a holistic energy justice lens which includes waste disposal. A new model of understanding energy justice is proposed that includes a life cycle evaluation of the energy source including its intergeneration justice that transfers the long-lasting waste to future generations.