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) |
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 works in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, [6] [7] where he leads DOE's Consent-Based Siting Consortia: twelve project teams - drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector - awarded $24m to facilitate public engagement and build community capacity for siting one or more federal consolidated interim storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] Ialenti is also a research associate at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt's Department of Environmental Studies. [13]
Ialenti has been on the research faculty at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs [14] [15] and has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, [16] the University of British Columbia, [17] The Berggruen Institute, [18] and Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. [19]
Ialenti holds a MSc in "Law, Anthropology, and Society" from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University. [20] [21] At Cornell, Ialenti taught an interdisciplinary writing seminar called Nuclear Imagination: Technology and Worlds. [22] [23]
In 2017, Ialenti became the first anthropologist with a feature article in Physics Today , the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics. [24] [25] 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. [26] [27]
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. [28] He also served on the U.S. Membership Committee of Northwestern University's trans-Pacific think-tank Meridian 180. [29]
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. [30] [31] [32] He developed this study in collaboration with geologist Allison Macfarlane, the former Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. [33]
MIT Press and Penguin Random House published Ialenti's first book, Deep Time Reckoning, in 2020. [34] 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. [35] [36] [37]
In 2021, Ialenti became the first cultural anthropologist with an article published in the American Nuclear Society's technical journal Nuclear Technology. [38] [39] Later that year, Ialenti was featured alongside ambient musician Brian Eno in a Headspace meditation podcast about long-term thinking. [40]
Ialenti is married to conservationist Allegra Wrocklage. [41] They reside in Los Angeles, California, after having moved from Vancouver, Canada. [42]
Ialenti is an Associate of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, California. [43]
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. Reactors producing controlled fusion power have been operated since 1958 but have yet to generate net power and are not expected to be commercially available in the near future.
Renewable energy is energy from renewable natural resources that are replenished on a human timescale. The most widely used renewable energy types are solar energy, wind power, and hydropower. Bioenergy and geothermal power are also significant in some countries. Some also consider nuclear power a renewable power source, although this is controversial. Renewable energy installations can be large or small and are suited for both urban and rural areas. Renewable energy is often deployed together with further electrification. This has several benefits: electricity can move heat and vehicles efficiently and is clean at the point of consumption. Variable renewable energy sources are those that have a fluctuating nature, such as wind power and solar power. In contrast, controllable renewable energy sources include dammed hydroelectricity, bioenergy, or geothermal power.
The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 80 mi (130 km) northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.
A nuclear power plant (NPP), also known as a nuclear power station (NPS), nuclear generating station (NGS) or atomic power station (APS) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power stations, heat is used to generate steam that drives a steam turbine connected to a generator that produces electricity. As of September 2023, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that there were 410 nuclear power reactors in operation in 32 countries around the world, and 57 nuclear power reactors under construction.
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, in New Mexico, US, 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." Definitions of sustainable energy usually look at its effects on the environment, the economy, and society. These impacts range from greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution to energy poverty and toxic waste. Renewable energy sources such as wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal energy can cause environmental damage but are generally far more sustainable than fossil fuel sources.
A deep geological repository is a way of storing hazardous or radioactive waste within a stable geologic environment, typically 200–1,000 m below the surface of the earth. 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 is intended to prevent radioactive dangers. A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada and Germany. Radioactive waste storage sites 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 addresses the handling of radioactive materials generated from nuclear power production and nuclear weapons manufacture. Radioactive waste contains both short-lived and long-lived radionuclides, as well as non-radioactive nuclides. In 2002, the United States stored approximately 47,000 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste.
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 will be operational by 2026, and decommissioned by 2100.
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 established by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981.
The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, or CFETR, 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 while ensuring a lower environmental impact and a smaller carbon footprint than fossil fuel-based power plants.
This timeline of sustainable energy research from 2020 to the present documents research and development in renewable energy, solar energy, and nuclear energy, particularly regarding energy production that is sustainable within the Earth system.