Vincent Ialenti | |
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Born | Gardner, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Education |
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Occupation | Anthropologist |
Employer(s) | Office of Nuclear Energy, United States Department of Energy |
Notable work | Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now (2020) |
Spouse | Allegra Wrocklage |
Vincent Ialenti is an American anthropologist who studies the culture of nuclear energy and weapons waste organizations. [1] He is the author of Deep Time Reckoning, [2] an anthropological exploration of how experts assessed the potential impact of Finland's Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository on future ecosystems and civilization. [3] [4] [5]
Ialenti has been on the research faculty at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs [6] [7] and has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, [8] the University of British Columbia, [9] The Berggruen Institute, [10] and Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. [11]
Ialenti currently works for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, [12] [13] advising senior leadership on efforts to implement more environmentally just and consent-based approaches to siting nuclear waste facilities. [14] [15]
Ialenti holds a BA, in "Philosophy, Politics, and Law" from Binghamton University, an MSc in "Law, Anthropology, and Society" from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University. [16] [17] At Cornell, Ialenti taught an interdisciplinary writing seminar called Nuclear Imagination: Technology and Worlds. [18] [19]
In 2017, Ialenti became the first anthropologist with a feature article in Physics Today , the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics. [20] [21] Later that year, Helsingin Sanomat published a front-page human interest story about his anthropological search for insights left behind by an enigmatic nuclear waste expert he called Seppo. [22] [23]
In 2018, Ialenti was a Nuclear Security Innovation Network Fellow in the N Square Collaborative, a nuclear threat awareness collective funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Ploughshares Fund. [24] He also served on the U.S. Membership Committee of Northwestern University's trans-Pacific think-tank Meridian 180. [25]
From 2017 to 2019, Ialenti conducted a field study exploring the political, economic, and organizational drivers behind transuranic nuclear weapons waste "drum breach" accidents at Idaho National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. [26] [27] [28] He developed this study in collaboration with geologist Allison Macfarlane, the former Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. [29]
MIT Press published Ialenti's first book, Deep Time Reckoning, in 2020. It was distributed by Penguin Random House. [30] The book examined Finnish nuclear waste company Posiva's efforts to make reductive, pragmatic models of far future societies, bodies, and ecosystems—and how their efforts were enabled by the Finnish populace's relatively high levels of trust in geotechnical engineers, regulators, and ministry experts. [31] [32] [33]
In 2021, Ialenti became the first cultural anthropologist with an article published in the American Nuclear Society's technical journal Nuclear Technology. [34] [35] The article examines Finland's cooperative "mankala" nuclear energy LLCs through the lens of legal-anthropological theories of corporate form. [36] Later that year, Ialenti was featured alongside ambient musician Brian Eno in a Headspace meditation podcast about long-term thinking. [37]
Ialenti is an Associate of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, California. [38]
Ialenti is married to conservationist Allegra Wrocklage. [39] They reside in Los Angeles, California, after having moved from Vancouver, Canada. [40]
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Generating electricity from fusion power remains the focus of international research.
Renewable energy is energy from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. Renewable resources include sunlight, wind, the movement of water, and geothermal heat. Although most renewable energy sources are sustainable, some are not. For example, some biomass sources are considered unsustainable at current rates of exploitation. Renewable energy is often used for electricity generation, heating and cooling. Renewable energy projects are typically large-scale, but they are also suited to rural and remote areas and developing countries, where energy is often crucial in human development. Renewable energy is often deployed together with further electrification, which has several benefits: electricity can move heat or objects efficiently, and is clean at the point of consumption.
Fusion power is a proposed form of power generation that would generate electricity by using heat from nuclear fusion reactions. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing energy. Devices designed to harness this energy are known as fusion reactors. Research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s, but as of 2023, no device has reached net power.
Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his book Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, is the world's third deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. The storage rooms at the WIPP are 2,150 feet underground in a salt formation of the Delaware Basin. The waste is from the research and production of United States nuclear weapons only. The plant started operation in 1999, and the project is estimated to cost $19 billion in total.
Energy is sustainable if it "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Most definitions of sustainable energy include considerations of environmental aspects such as greenhouse gas emissions and social and economic aspects such as energy poverty. Renewable energy sources such as wind, hydroelectric power, solar, and geothermal energy are generally far more sustainable than fossil fuel sources. However, some renewable energy projects, such as the clearing of forests to produce biofuels, can cause severe environmental damage.
A deep geological repository is a way of storing hazardous or radioactive waste within a stable geologic environment. It entails a combination of waste form, waste package, engineered seals and geology that is suited to provide a high level of long-term isolation and containment without future maintenance. This will prevent any radioactive dangers. A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada and Germany and a number of radioactive waste storages are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced.
Spent nuclear fuel, occasionally called used nuclear fuel, is nuclear fuel that has been irradiated in a nuclear reactor. It is no longer useful in sustaining a nuclear reaction in an ordinary thermal reactor and, depending on its point along the nuclear fuel cycle, it will have different isotopic constituents than when it started.
Nuclear power in the European Union accounted for approximately 26% of total electricity production in 2019 and nearly half of low-carbon energy production across the EU.
The nuclear power debate is a long-running controversy about the risks and benefits of using nuclear reactors to generate electricity for civilian purposes. The debate about nuclear power peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, as more and more reactors were built and came online, and "reached an intensity unprecedented in the history of technology controversies" in some countries. In the 2010s, with growing public awareness about climate change and the critical role that carbon dioxide and methane emissions plays in causing the heating of the earth's atmosphere, there was a resurgence in the intensity of the nuclear power debate.
High-level radioactive waste management concerns how radioactive materials created during production of nuclear power and nuclear weapons are dealt with. Radioactive waste contains a mixture of short-lived and long-lived nuclides, as well as non-radioactive nuclides. There was reportedly some 47,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste stored in the United States in 2002.
Into Eternity is a 2010 Danish documentary film directed by Michael Madsen, released in 2010. It follows the construction of the Onkalo waste repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland. Director Michael Madsen questions Onkalo's intended eternal existence, addressing an audience in the remote future.
The Human Interference Task Force was a team of engineers, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, behavioral scientists and others convened on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel Corp. to find a way to reduce the likelihood of future humans unintentionally intruding on radioactive waste isolation systems.
The Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository is a deep geological repository for the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel. It is near the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in the municipality of Eurajoki, on the west coast of Finland. It will be the world's first long-term disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel. It is being constructed by Posiva, and is based on the KBS-3 method of nuclear waste burial developed in Sweden by Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB (SKB). The facility is expected to be operational in the mid 2020s.
Muon tomography or muography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate two or three-dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. Since muons are much more deeply penetrating than X-rays, muon tomography can be used to image through much thicker material than x-ray based tomography such as CT scanning. The muon flux at the Earth's surface is such that a single muon passes through an area the size of a human hand per second.
Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are communication attempts intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor is a proposed tokamak fusion reactor, which uses a magnetic field in order to confine plasma and generate energy. As of 2015, tokamak devices are leading candidates for the construction of a viable and practical thermonuclear fusion reactor. These reactors may be used to generate sustainable energy whilst ensuring a low environmental impact and a smaller carbon footprint than fossil fuel-based power plants.
Timeline of notable events in the research and development of sustainable energy, including renewable energy, solar energy, and nuclear fusion energy, particularly for ways that are sustainable within the Earth system.