The PFS efforts to make money and provide safe storage for the waste their facilities are generating are not meeting stockholder?s expectations. As previously mention in this paper the major obstacle to siting the MRS facilities is not the storage facility itself, but transporting the waste to the facility. The solutions that I propose to address the problems will eliminate the need to transport the waste on public roads and rail spurs. Nuclear power facilities are located on large parcels of land that serve as a buffer between the nuclear power plant and the residents of the neighboring towns, villages and cities. The state and federal governments require facilities of this magnitude to prepare a General Development Plan (GDP) for their facilities. A GDP is a state and federally approved plan for a Development of Regional Impact (DRI). A GDP plan depicts buildings or land improvements that are not yet constructed, but are planned. In the event a company wants to expand its facilities it does not have to go through public hearings if the proposed facility is included on the GDP.
I propose to construct limited MRS facilities at each nuclear power plant. Each MRS facility will be designed to handle all the nuclear waste that will be generated by each facility over the life of the facility. The benefits of this plan are as follows: The need to transport hazardous material on public roads and rail lines will be eliminated, The cost of legal fees will be reduced, the cost to transport the waste will be reduced by 85%, there will be no need to payoff landowners, there will be no need to pay the $250 million to the Skull Valley Goshute Tribe, the American public will realize efficient electrical power without being endangered and the nuclear facilities are consolidated and easier to monitor. This plan also addresses the question of waste-equity by having the benefactors of nuclear power bearing the burden of string its byproducts. The stockholders as well as the American public will realize the benefits of this plan.
When I began ethically evaluating the proposal detailed I thought of John Rawls? method for evaluating fairness. ?The method he proposes consists of determining what principles a group of rational self-interested persons would chose to live by if they knew they would live in a society governed by those principles, but they did not yet know what each of them would turn out to be like in that society? (Velasquez 115). I believe this rational applies to this case. I would not want to live next to a nuclear waste storage facility if I did not benefit from the nuclear power that generated the waste.
Jeremy Bentham and his traditional views of utilitarianism also lend itself to this evaluation. ?The utilitarian principle assumes that we can somehow measure and add the quantities of benefits produced by an action and subtract from them the measured quantities of harm the action will have, and thereby determine which action produces the greatest total benefits for all. In this case I have detailed all the cost involved in siting a facility in a rural state that does not benefit from the power the waste generated. The costs are much less and the environmental impact consolidated when the nuclear power and the storage of nuclear waste are consolidated in close proximity to each other.
I believe the management decision that I have generated is the appropriate plan of action based on the SAGE sequence for ethical decision making.
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