Events

Upcoming events

A long tunnel extends into the dark, with rail-tracks below and pipes above and to the right
Yucca Mountain tunnel

America’s Nuclear Waste Gridlock and the Future of the Humboldt Bay Spent Fuel Site — April 30, 2026 @ 5:30 pm

We invite you to join us for a presentation by Vincent Ialenti, on Thursday, April 30 @ 5:30 pm in BSS 166 at Cal Poly Humboldt (next to the Native American Forum). This event is free and open to the public, and ADA accessible parking is available in the lot immediately to the south of the Native Forum building. For questions or accessibility requests, please contact schatzenergy@humboldt.edu or call 707-826-4345.

The United States has generated more than 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel but still lacks a permanent underground repository to store it. As a result, nuclear waste remains stranded at more than seventy sites across the country — including the Humboldt Bay spent fuel storage installation — while federal policy has cycled through decades of stalled initiatives, legal constraints, and partisan policy realignments.

Drawing on his experience as a senior program manager in the U.S. Department of Energy (2022–2025) and more than fifteen years of research on nuclear institutions, anthropologist Vincent Ialenti examines the legal, financial, and cultural forces that have kept the U.S. nuclear waste program in a prolonged state of gridlock. Taking Humboldt Bay as a local reference point, Ialenti situates the North Coast site within the broader national challenge of governing radioactive materials with half-lives extending millions of years into the distant future. The talk explores how societies attempt to make credible intergenerational promises about safety, stewardship, and justice — and why such promises have proven difficult to sustain amid the rapid tempos of American political culture.

About the speaker

Vincent Ialenti is an anthropologist who explores how nuclear institutions govern time, engage publics, and sustain continuity across uncertain futures. During the Biden Administration, he served as a senior program manager in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, where he led the Consent-Based Siting Consortia: a $24m national program advancing community participation in siting spent nuclear fuel storage facilities. Prior to his federal service, Ialenti was a MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and held fellowships at USC, University of British Columbia, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. He is now on the research faculty of Cal Poly Humboldt’s Department of Environmental Studies.

Ialenti is the author of Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020) and Longstorming (MIT Press, forthcoming). His work has been featured by the BBC, Scientific American, NPR, Forbes, and other outlets. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and The Berggruen Institute. Ialenti holds a PhD from Cornell University and a MSc from the London School of Economics.

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