The United States has a growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants that continues to accumulate at reactor sites around the country.

In addition, the legacy waste from U.S. defense programs remains at Department of Energy sites around the country, mainly at Hanford, WA, Savannah River, SC, and at Idaho National Laboratory.

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“The processing and handling of waste is slow to stopped and in this environment the pressure has become very great to do something.”

Currently, more than seventy thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from civilian reactors is sitting in temporary aboveground storage facilities spread across 35 states, with many of the reactors that produced it shut down.  And U.S. taxpayers are paying the utilities billions of dollars to keep it there.

Meanwhile, the deep geologic repository where all that waste was supposed to go, in Yucca Mountain Nevada, is now permanently on hold, after strong resistance from Nevada residents and politicians led by U.S. Senator Harry Reid.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad New Mexico, the world’s first geologic repository for transuranic waste, has been closed for over a year due to a release of radioactivity.

And other parts of the system, such as the vitrification plant at Hanford and the mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River , SC, are way behind schedule and over budget.

It’s a growing problem that’s unlikely to change this political season.

“The chances of dealing with it in the current Congress are pretty much nil, in my view,” said former U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM).

“We’re not going to see a solution to this problem this year or next year.”

The issue in Congress is generally divided along political lines, with Republicans wanting to move forward with the original plan to build a repository at Yucca Mountain, while Democrats support the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to create a new organization to manage nuclear waste in the U.S. and start looking for a new repository location using an inclusive, consent-based process.

“One of the big worries that I have with momentum loss is loss of nuclear competency,” said David Clark, a Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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Meanwhile, other countries are moving ahead with plans for their own repositories, with Finland and Sweden leading the pack, leaving the U.S. lagging behind.

So Ewing decided to convene a series of high-level conferences, where leading academics and nuclear experts from around the world can discuss the issues in a respectful environment with a diverse range of stakeholders – including former politicians and policy makers, scientists and representatives of Indian tribes and other effected communities.

“For many of these people and many of these constituencies, I’ve seen them argue at length, and it’s usually in a situation where a lot seems to be at stake and it’s very adversarial,” said Ewing.

“So by having the meeting at Stanford, we’ve all taken a deep breath, the program is frozen in place, nothing’s going to go anywhere tomorrow, we have the opportunity to sit and discuss things. And I think that may help.”

Former Senator Bingaman said he hoped the multidisciplinary meetings, known at the “Reset of Nuclear Waste Management Strategy and Policy Series”, would help spur progress on this pressing problem.

“There is a high level of frustration by people who are trying to find a solution to this problem of nuclear waste, and there’s no question that the actions that we’ve taken thus far have not gotten us very far,” Bingaman said.

“I think that’s why this conference that is occurring is a good thing, trying to think through what are the problems that got us into the mess we’re in, and how do we avoid them in the future.”

The latest conference, held earlier this month, considered the question of how to structure a new nuclear waste management organization in the U.S.

Speakers from Sweden, Canada and France brought an international perspective and provided lessons learned from their countries nuclear waste storage programs.

“The other…major programs, France, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Canada, they all reached a crisis point, not too different from our own,” said Ewing.

“And at this crisis point they had to reevaluate how they would go forward. They each chose a slightly different path, but having thought about it, and having selected a new path, one can also observe that their programs are moving forward.”

France has chosen to adopt a closed nuclear cycle to recycle spent fuel and reuse it to generate more electricity.

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“We also reduce the toxicity because…we are removing the plutonium. And finally, we are conditioning the final waste under the form of nuclear glass, the lifetime of which is very long, in the range of a million years in repository conditions.”

Clark said that Stanford was the perfect place to convene a multidisciplinary group of thought leaders in the field who could have a real impact on the future of nuclear waste storage policy.

“The beauty of a conference like this, and holding it at a place like Stanford University and CISAC, is that all the right people are here,” he said.

“All the people who are here have the ability to influence, through some level of authority and scholarship, and they’ll be able to take the ideas that they’ve heard back to their different offices and different organizations.  I think it will make a difference, and I’m really happy to be part of it.”

Ewing said it was also important to include students in the conversation.

“There’s a next generation of researchers coming online, and I want to save them the time that it took me to realize what the problems are,” Ewing said.

“By mixing students into this meeting, letting them interact with all the parties, including the distinguished scientists and engineers, I’m hoping it speeds up the process.”

Professor Ewing is already planning his next conference, next March, which will focus on the consent-based process that will be used to identify a new location within the U.S. for a repository.

The Japanese public is largely opposed to dispatching the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) to the Strait of Hormuz, but framing the issue in terms of Japan’s energy dependence substantially raises support for military involvement in Iran. By contrast, arguments invoking the Japan-U.S. alliance and legal legitimacy for military action have no such effect. These are the findings from a vignette experiment fielded by the Stanford Japan Barometer (SJB) in March, one month after Japan’s February 2026 general election.

The results also reveal that mentioning energy dependence moves opinion in favor of military deployment even among respondents who are told that diplomacy, not deployment, is the right response, suggesting that energy-dependence messaging changes minds regardless of policy recommendation. Alliance- and legal-focused messaging, by contrast, have no measurable effect.

SJB is a large-scale, multi-wave public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues in Japan. A project of the Japan Program at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), SJB is led by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC and the Japan Program, and political scientist Charles Crabtree. The vignette experiment on the Japanese public's attitude toward military deployment in Iran was part of the final, three-wave panel survey SJB fielded around Japan’s February 2026 snap election, which focused on identifying public attitudes toward immigration.

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A Public Wary of War

The SJB experiment finds that, without any contextual framing, Japanese respondents lean against JSDF dispatch to the Strait of Hormuz, averaging a score of 2.00 on a four-point scale, where 1 represents "strongly oppose" and 4 represents "strongly support." 

This baseline skepticism reflects the Japanese public’s reluctance to deploy military forces abroad, rooted in Article 9 of the postwar constitution, and a broader wariness of entanglement in the Iran conflict. But the crisis in the Middle East has fueled deep economic fears in Japan, which relies on the region for over 90% of its crude oil imports, making it highly dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for energy security.

The SJB team wanted to know: Could this energy security argument shift the public’s baseline opposition to military deployment, and if so, how, compared with other justifications?

The Energy Argument Works Both Directions

The experiment randomly assigned respondents to read one of several short policy statements before answering whether they supported JSDF dispatch to the Strait of Hormuz. Some arguments favored deployment; others opposed it. Each invoked a different rationale: energy security, the Japan-U.S. alliance, and constitutional legitimacy.

The most striking change in attitude came from the energy-dependence framing.

Respondents who read a pro-dispatch energy argument – emphasizing that a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would devastate Japan's economy and living standards, making military involvement necessary – showed a statistically significant increase in support for JSDF deployment, rising approximately 0.12 points above the control group.

Notably, respondents who read a con-dispatch energy argument – which presented the same energy-dependence facts but concluded that Japan should pursue diplomacy through its own channels with Iran rather than deploy forces – showed an even larger increase in support, rising approximately 0.28 points above the control group.

That is, simply mentioning Japan's vulnerability to an oil supply disruption raised support for JSDF involvement, even when the message explicitly argued against military action. “This pattern suggests that the energy-dependence information itself, rather than the normative conclusion drawn from it, is what moves opinion,” the researchers write on the SJB website.

Alliance and Legal Arguments Fall Flat

In contrast, two other commonly invoked arguments – obligations related to the Japan-U.S. alliance and constitutional authority – had virtually no effect on the Japanese public’s support of JSDF deployment.

The alliance framing emphasized that contributing to U.S. operations in the Strait of Hormuz is essential, given the centrality of the U.S.-Japan security partnership to Japan's defense. A counter-argument noted that many international observers view U.S. strikes on Iran as violations of international law and that most European allies are declining to participate.

Neither version significantly moved opinion on JSDF dispatch.

Similarly, arguments about whether the conflict legally qualifies for the exercise of collective self-defense – with one version arguing that new legislation could authorize dispatch and another arguing that no existing legal basis permits it – produced near-zero effects.

These null results are particularly striking given how frequently alliance obligations and constitutional legitimacy dominate elite debates over JSDF deployment in Japan. The data suggest that, at least in this scenario, these arguments resonate far more in policy circles than with the general public.

The findings carry important lessons for Japanese policymakers, who are walking a tightrope between the United States and Iran: “Concrete economic stakes are more resonant than foreign-policy abstractions,” note the SJB researchers. Still, the Japanese public’s default position is opposition to JSDF deployment in Iran. “The framing experiments shift opinion at the margins, but do not reverse the underlying skepticism toward JSDF dispatch.”