Conference Agenda

The management and disposal of spent nuclear fuel represent one of the most persistent governance challenges in nuclear energy policy. Despite decades of technological development, only a limited number of countries—most notably Finland and Sweden—have finalized geological disposal facilities, while many others continue to rely on interim storage. Given the long time horizons, high costs, and transboundary risks involved, spent fuel management increasingly exceeds the capacity of purely national policy frameworks.

In Europe, international cooperation has played a crucial role in addressing these challenges. Institutions such as the Western European Nuclear Regulators Association (WENRA) have extended regulatory cooperation beyond reactor safety to include spent fuel management, waste storage, and decommissioning. Through regulatory harmonization, peer review, and shared learning, European cooperation has enhanced not only technical safety but also policy credibility and public trust, even while final disposal decisions remain nationally embedded.

In contrast, East Asia diverges from the global trend toward direct disposal. Japan and China continue to pursue reprocessing, while South Korea is actively reconsidering its long-term strategy under growing storage constraints. These divergent pathways, combined with geopolitical tensions and nonproliferation sensitivities, complicate prospects for regional cooperation despite strong incentives arising from shared environmental and safety risks.

Rather than advocating institutional transplantation, this article extracts transferable “minimum modules” of cooperation from the European experience. It proposes a phased framework for East Asia, beginning with confidence-building measures such as environmental monitoring and data sharing, advancing toward regulatory learning and joint research, and treating shared disposal strategies as a long-term horizon. The analysis highlights international cooperation not merely as a technical option, but as an institutional foundation for trust, legitimacy, and sustainable nuclear governance

Historically, international contract enforcement relied on military power. In the late 1960s, Western Great Powers—US, UK, France—reduced military interventions, increasing expropriation risk in developing countries. Using microdata from the petroleum industry, we show that this geopolitical shift led to a 2–4-year delay in production (“backloading”) in developing countries by multinationals headquartered in Western Great Powers, matching the extent of backloading exhibited by multinationals based in other advanced economies. As a results of the backloading, resource-rich developing economies experienced annual revenue losses of $1 billion per country, which was offset by higher government rent shares. These patterns are consistent with the emergence of self-enforcing agreements.

The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to evolving expectations about climate legislation, intended to limit future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present, lowering present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures reacted negatively to daily changes in prediction market expectations regarding the Waxman-Markey bill—the U.S. climate bill discussed in 2009–2010. This effect is observed across various maturities, with an even larger impact on more distant maturitiesis;, consistent with the Green Paradox prediction that the proposed legislation would have reset the entire price and consumption path temporary supply or demand shocks would phase out over time. The decrease in oil prices is accompanied by a decrease in storage levels as consumption accelerates while it takes time for new production to come online. Furthermore, two unexpected court rulings that implied limited future fossil fuel use were also associated with negative abnormal oil future returns. Taken together, these findings confirm that restricting future fossil fuel use accelerates current-day consumption. The passage of the Waxmann-Markey bill would have increased current global oil consumption by 2%.

Every society faces decisions about where to locate infrastructure that benefits the general public but creates concentrated local costs. This study examines how decentralizing decision-making authority shapes the allocation of critical yet locally contested facilities, focusing on Sweden's introduction of municipal veto power over onshore wind farms. Using data on all approved and rejected onshore wind farms, we generate site-specific estimates of energy production and local externalities, measured by impacts on individual real estate transaction prices. To assess the consequences of decentralization, we develop a simulation that compares each planned wind farm in Sweden over the past 25 years with every possible alternative site to which developers could have applied. This analysis highlights an inherent trade-off between national efficiency and reducing local externalities. Faced with this trade-off, local politicians with veto rights prioritize their constituents' interests and are more likely to reject applications that would impose higher costs on local residents. Decentralization reduces local burdens at the expense of national siting efficiency and shifts costs toward neighboring municipalities and socially disadvantaged groups.