9 Items

The Grohnde Nuclear Power Plant in Germany.

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Journal Article - Issues in Science and Technology

A Viable Nuclear Industry

| Summer 2021

Aditi Verma and Denia Djokić call for rethinking our collective approach to the benefits and risks of nuclear technology—a call that is crucial and timely. As humanity confronts the catastrophic consequences of climate change, questions related to the viability of nuclear energy to achieve a decarbonized world abound. The authors, however, push the boundaries of the current conversation by arguing that what is required to make nuclear energy “viable” for the twenty-first century is much more than just an exercise in technological development.

A power-generating unit control panel at Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in Kurchatov, Russia, in 2008.

Sergey Pyatakov/Wikimedia Commons

Analysis & Opinions - Issues in Science and Technology

Reimagining Nuclear Engineering

| May 07, 2021

Nuclear reactors remain a technology whose risks and benefits, potential and real, are inequitably distributed in society, temporally and geographically. The fuel that powers reactors comes from mines that have poisoned Indigenous communities and Global South nations for decades. The connection between a nation’s nuclear energy capability and its possession of nuclear weapons, though once direct and now more attenuated, nevertheless persists. And finally there are the environmental footprints of the nuclear era: its wastes. Though often described by nuclear engineers as a technically solved problem, the disposition of nuclear waste remains unresolved in most countries (Finland and Sweden are exceptions), its fate an ongoing open question, particularly in the United States. However this question may eventually be answered, nuclear waste will perhaps be the most enduring vestige of the Anthropocene.

Cranes near Reactor Unit 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in October 2011.

IAEA Imagebank/Wikimedia Commons

Analysis & Opinions - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Highly Enriched Shareholders Mean Disasters Down the Line: Why Utilities Like TEPCO Need New Corporate Governance

| Mar. 11, 2021

Ten years on, the lessons learned from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident continue to focus on improving safety culture and regulatory oversight. However, the executive decisions that failed to prevent the disaster also demonstrate the necessity to re-examine the legal entities most often relied on for producing nuclear power: corporations.

Audio

Racism and Nuclear Weapons, Part II: Katlyn Turner, Denia Djokić and Aditi Verma on the "Press the Button" podcast

| Jan. 26, 2021

Drs. Katlyn Turner, Denia Djokic, and Aditi Verma are back on "Press the Button" to further explore systemic racism in the nuclear field, and how to begin rooting it out. They also discuss the production of their recently co-authored article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, titled "A Call for Anti-Racist Action and Accountability in the US Nuclear Community."

Audio

Racism and Nuclear Weapons: Katlyn Turner, Denia Djokić and Aditi Verma on the "Press the Button" podcast

| Jan. 05, 2021

Drs. Katlyn Turner, Denia Djokić, and Aditi Verma join the "Press the Button" podcast for an in-depth discussion on how systemic racism in the nuclear field is produced and sustained, and what needs to happen in order to begin combating it. Drs. Turner, Djokić, and Verma recently co-authored an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled "A Call for Anti-Racist Action and Accountability in the US Nuclear Community."

A US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the 1940s.

WikiImages/Pixabay

Magazine Article - MIT News Office

3Q: Fighting Racism in the Nuclear Community

| Sep. 19, 2020

A group of nuclear scientists recently published a call for anti-racist action in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, urging researchers and their colleagues to confront a long legacy of racial disparities and injustices in the history of the nuclear field, many of which continue today.

A 1945 photo of the “Calutron Girls” of the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee includes only one Black employee, despite the instrumental role of Black women at the facility. The image has been altered to bring focus to her.

Wikimedia Commons / Ed Westcott, American Museum of Science and Energy

Analysis & Opinions - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A Call for Antiracist Action and Accountability in the US Nuclear Community

| Aug. 24, 2020

As part of the ensuing national racial reckoning, institutions within the US nuclear community—academic departments, think tanks, advocacy groups, national laboratories, and others—have issued statements condemning systemic racism. (Several institutions within the nuclear community, at the time of writing this article, had still not produced a statement.) But the nuclear community must go beyond acknowledgement alone if it genuinely aims to dismantle long-standing structural inequalities. For these institutions, the true work of becoming antiracist still lies ahead: accepting and rectifying their own complicity in the problem.