In the absence of a federal geologic repository or consolidated, interim storage in the United States, commercial spent fuel will remain stranded at some 75 sites across the country. Currently, these include 18 “orphaned sites” where spent fuel has been left at decommissioned reactor sites.

Conventional ways of communicating about the transition to renewable energy in North America presuppose that energy systems can be changed while sustaining existing social, political, and economic relations. Energy democracy counters such ostensibly apolitical narratives by emphasizing the socially transformative potential of this transition. Yet energy democracy, as both organizing principle and social movement, is itself increasingly recognized as flexible and contested.

By using long run case studies and comparative analysis, I will address different processes by which alerts and criticisms are taken seriously by different actors and lead them to transform or to defend devices, norms and institutions. To deal with this kind of process, I will present an analytical model which runs on the recent controversies about radioactivity, GMOs and nanotechnologies. For many years, these fields have been marked by struggles in which scientific arguments are seldom dominant but are nevertheless relevant.

Mainstream approaches to energy democracy and public engagement with energy transitions tend to adopt specific, pre-given meanings of both “democracy” and “publics.” Different approaches impose prescriptive assumptions about the model of participation, the identity of public participants, and what it means to participate well.

The goal of this literature review is to bring together the different concepts, respective definitions and perspectives that have been used to study the participation of non-professionals in scientific activities. We start by presenting a short definition of citizen science and the perceived benefits of such approaches to the production of scientific knowledge. We then clarify the difference between today’s citizen science projects and their ancestors in the field sciences by highlighting technological and social changes.

The purpose of this report is to equip the Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) with evidence-based recommendations to further equity and environmental justice (EJ) efforts within their capacity as the state’s environmental regulatory agency, in service of advancing EJ for those who live, work, and play in Washington. This report is intended to share promising trends and tools, acknowledge common barriers and ideas for overcoming those barriers, elevate successes, and amplify equitable practices for defining, measuring, mobilizing, and sustaining meaningful EJ work.

This Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) Manual is designed as a tool for project practitioners (herein referred as project managers) for a broad range of projects and programmes (hereinafter to be referred to as projects) of any development organization, by providing information about the right to FPIC and how it can be implemented in six steps.

Since the concept of energy poverty first emerged, studies have combined normative orientations, analytical approaches and policy review to engage with energy deprivation as a problematic feature of contemporary societies. Over the past decade, this scholarship has aimed to conceptualize the normative grounds for critique, empirical work and policy design when engaging with the interplay of social life and energy systems.

Energy justice is now an established research topic in the field of energy policy. Despite the growing popularity of energy justice research, however, conceptual and analytical frameworks used in the field have remained limited. This paper reviews the prevailing three-tenet framework of energy justice which has shaped the current discourse based on the three dimensions—distributional, procedural, and recognition justice.

With the termination of the Yucca Mountain project, which was proposed to be our nation’s first repository for the disposal of military and civilian spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, the future of nuclear waste management and disposal in this country became increasingly uncertain. Interim storage has been advocated by many as a temporary solution while a permanent solution is studied for potentially several more decades to come.

The Community Guide to Environmental Justice and NEPA Methods provides information for communities who want to assure that their environmental justice (EJ) issues are adequately considered when there is a Federal agency action that may involve environmental impacts on minority populations, low-income populations, and/or Indian tribes and indigenous communities. Such Federal actions include:

Effective risk communication is essential to the well-being of any organization and those people who depend on it. Ineffective communication can cost lives, money, and reputations. Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User's Guide provides the scientific foundations for effective communication.

This report documents the work of one of the most successful Federal advisory committees in the history of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was established by EPA on September 30, 1993 to provide independent advice to the EPA Administrator on broad, cross-cutting issues related to environmental justice.

In order to promote a sound basis for considering the role of nuclear in climate change, this review spans the technical topics of social and political debate surrounding nuclear energy with a focus on the objective science of these issues including nuclear waste, accidents and overall risk. Novel aspects include the emergence of nuclear energy as being potentially renewable and the antithesis of Fukushima being an argument for the unacceptable risks associated with the use of nuclear energy.

In October 2009, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (Board or NWTRB) published Survey of National Programs for Managing High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel.  For each of the 13 national programs studied, the report catalogued 15 institutional arrangements that had been set in place and 15 technical approaches that had been taken to design repository systems for the long-term management of high-activity radioactive waste.

The question of whether centralized storage of civilian spent nuclear fuel (SNF) should be part of the federal waste management system as an intermediate step before permanent disposal has been debated for more than four decades. Centralized storage facilities were included as a potential component of the U.S. spent fuel management system in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), but the NWPA did not identify these facilities as being essential.

A viral YouTube video recently discussed the age-old question “why don’t we shoot nuclear waste into space?”

It’s a topic we often get asked about on social media.

While the educational video’s cartoonish depictions of nuclear waste as glowing green ooze made some of our subject matter experts cringe, it’s clear that the content creators did their homework.

Status and Trends in Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management is a collaborative project between the IAEA, the European Commission and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, with the participation of nuclear industry organization the World Nuclear Association, that aims to consolidate and complement the information gathered from different initiatives around the world.

There has been, for decades, a worldwide consensus in the nuclear technical community for disposal through geological isolation of high-level waste (HLW), including spent nuclear fuel (SNF).  However, none of the national programs established to implement geological disposal has yet succeeded in establishing a geological repository and emplacing HLW in it. The large and growing HLW inventory from civilian and military reactor use over nearly 60 years remains in surface facilities intended only for interim storage.