Governing the Unseen: U.S. Nuclear Waste Futures & the Geo-cultural License to Operate

Join cultural anthropologist and former US Department of Energy official Dr Vincent Ialenti as he shares a fireside chat with Prof Mette High on American nuclear waste policy. During the Biden Administration, Dr Ialenti served as Federal Manager for DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia: twelve project teams – drawn from academia, nonprofits, the private sector, and beyond – awarded $24m to build community capacity and facilitate mutual learning about spent nuclear fuel management. This interdisciplinary dialogue will explore models for participatory governance, the integration of social science research into federal decision-making, prospects for revising the US Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and sociopolitical strategies for overcoming the United States’ current spent nuclear fuel gridlocks. Drawing on 32 months of ethnographic research on Finland’s Onkalo deep geological repository project, Ialenti will reflect on what it might take to cultivate a US “Geocultural License to Operate” a nuclear waste repository in today’s landscape of institutional fragmentation and partisan volatility.