Radioactive Waste Disposal Site Selection

The present paper treats the application of the approach and methods of system analysis and Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) for the solution of a typical problem of the decision-making theory -the site selection problem.The specific features of site selection for highly radioactive waste repository is the high degree of uncertainty, as well as the high responsibility of the choice itself -"responsibility for the future generations".The hierarchical structuring, the multi-model approach and the adequacy analysis overcome the uncertainty.A procedure has been developed including a set of AHP models -relative and ranking ones, applied to a different degree of detail and to different elements of the decision-making process.The analysis is performed and a choice is realized in a set of 30 potential sites according to 28 criteria distributed in 5 groups, the sites being evaluated using the criteria and 5 typical non-linear scales of preference.