Governing the Unseen: U.S. Nuclear Waste Futures & the Geocultural 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.
Dr Vincent Ialenti is a cultural anthropologist who studies how nuclear waste organizations engage with time and envision the future. He is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Environmental Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. From 2022 to May 2025, he worked as a Program Manager and Social Scientist in the US Department of Energy’s Office of Spent Fuel & High-Level Waste Disposition. Prior to his federal service, he was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and held fellowships at University of Southern California, University of British Columbia, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. His book Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020) examines how Finland’s spent nuclear fuel repository safety case experts pondered the limits of knowledge and grappled with distant future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. Dr Ialenti has published with American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, Physics Today, Nuclear Technology, Science & Technology Studies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Nature Geoscience, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His work has been featured by the BBC, Scientific American, NPR, Science, Forbes, The Telegraph, Wired Japan, ABC Radio Australia, and other outlets. Vincent holds a PhD from Cornell University and a MSc from the London School of Economics.