Within our transdisciplinary research project (www.transens.de), we work jointly with 14 citizens (citizen working group or CWG) who are interested in the topic without being activists or having a specific agenda. The CWG helps us to enrich the research process with experiential knowledge. Parallel to gaining scientific knowledge, trust can be built due to close collaboration.

Radiation dose estimates over several thousand years, as required for the German site selection procedure, are subject to high uncertainties. Within a transdisciplinary workshop, strategies for communicating such dose estimates and uncertainties are evaluated. Factors will be identified that promote or hinder understandability of modelling results, and the general confidence in the significance of dose estimates as a safety indicator for nuclear waste repositories will be investigated.

In our project, several disciplines work on issues concerning the management of high-level nuclear waste in Germany. In our sub-project on trust, we have enlisted a group of 16 citizens, reflecting with us on our research questions and approaches. From joint workshops of researchers and these citizens on the role of trust in scientists we find that participants generally want to be taken seriously. Transparent and binding rules for all participants could be the key to a trusting relationship.