Public consent for the geologic disposal of highly radioactive wastes and spent nuclear fuel

Lawless, William F.; Akiyoshi, Mito; Angjellari-Dajci, Fiorentina; Whitton, John

doi:10.1080/00207233.2014.881165

Cited by 33 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…We also found that economic freedom and corruption were inversely correlated significantly (r = −0.77, p < 0.025), indicating that an increase in freedom was associated with a decrease in corruption. Heartened by these pilot results, we were ready to test our hypothesis with Equation (15). For Q 1 , we summed the result of FMD versus MPD to get 1.78.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Information constraints (barriers) under authoritarian regimes are less able to direct the movement of labor and capital to best solve targeted problems, an added constraint for innovation, one reason the Chinese rely on the theft of intellectual property (see the interview of General M. Hayden, the former CIA and NSA chief, by the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, [66]). Certainly, obstacles exist in democracies, especially when they become less free to allocate resources to solve the problems targeted (e.g., the Department of Energy's practices included cardboard boxes, seepage basins and other shortcuts to dispose of its radioactive wastes to save money that may eventually cost DOE well over two hundred billions of dollars to remediate its Hanford Site and its Savannah River Site; in Lawless [15]). Unlike Google's survey of teams [32], guided as it was by traditional social science, we have conjectured and found evidence that an improved theory of human behavior includes both cognitive (subjective surveys like Google's) and behavioral (physical) data which our quantum-like model handles well.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By itself, the application of Equation (10) to what follows for the action of teams (Equations 10, 11) can be criticized as a mere analogy and not formally motivated. However, a new discovery of redundancy or overstaffing among oil producers as teams coupled with another discovery (e.g., flawed DOE nuclear waste management teams of scientists and their managers with Equation 14 below; in Lawless [15]) add credibility to our formulation (e.g., [59]). …”

Section: Review Of Prior Research Mathematical Physicsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Public awareness stopped DOE's use of cardboard boxes in 1985. After DOE had openly admitted its past errors and had begun to rectify them, during the cleanup in 2000, renewed public support for DOE accelerated the closure of the same radioactive waste burial ground at SRS [15].…”

Section: Review Of Prior Research Mathematical Physicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As an example of the mismanagement associated with consensus-seeking (i.e., minority control; in Lawless [15]), DOE planned to vitrify high-level radioactive wastes into glass for its eventual geologic disposal starting in the 1980s at both its Hanford facility in Washington State and at its Savannah River Site in South Carolina. However, the consensus-seeking Hanford Citizens Advisory Board has not formally motivated DOE to accelerate its Hanford vitrification facility, a project plagued by gross mismanagement now delayed until 2033 [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Physics of Teams: Interdependence, Measurable Entropy, and Computational Emotion

Lawless

2017

Front. Phys.

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Most of the social sciences, including psychology, economics, and subjective social network theory, are modeled on the individual, leaving the field not only a-theoretical, but also inapplicable to a physics of hybrid teams, where hybrid refers to arbitrarily combining humans, machines, and robots into a team to perform a dedicated mission (e.g., military, business, entertainment) or to solve a targeted problem (e.g., with scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs). As a common social science practice, the ingredient at the heart of the social interaction, interdependence, is statistically removed prior to the replication of social experiments; but, as an analogy, statistically removing social interdependence to better study the individual is like statistically removing quantum effects as a complication to the study of the atom. Further, in applications of Shannon's information theory to teams, the effects of interdependence are minimized, but even there, interdependence is how classical information is transmitted. Consequently, numerous mistakes are made when applying non-interdependent models to policies, the law and regulations, impeding social welfare by failing to exploit the power of social interdependence. For example, adding redundancy to human teams is thought by subjective social network theorists to improve the efficiency of a network, easily contradicted by our finding that redundancy is strongly associated with corruption in non-free markets. Thus, built atop the individual, most of the social sciences, economics, and social network theory have little if anything to contribute to the engineering of hybrid teams. In defense of the social sciences, the mathematical physics of interdependence is elusive, non-intuitive and non-rational. However, by replacing determinism with bistable states, interdependence at the social level mirrors entanglement at the quantum level, suggesting the applicability of quantum tools for social science. We report how our quantum-like models capture some of the essential aspects of interdependence, a tool for the metrics of hybrid teams; as an example, we find additional support for our model of the solution to the open problem of team size. We also report on progress with the theory of computational emotion for hybrid teams, linking it qualitatively to the second law of thermodynamics. We conclude that the science of interdependence advances the science of hybrid teams.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%