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.

Hosted at Stanford University’s Frances. C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, the Trust & Safety Research Conference convenes participants working on trust and safety issues across academia, industry, civil society, and government. The event brings together a cross-disciplinary group of academics and researchers in fields including computer science, sociology, law, and political science to connect with practitioners and policymakers on challenges and new ideas for studying and addressing online trust and safety issues.

Your ticket provides access to:

• Two days of talks, panels, workshops and breakouts
• Breakfast and lunch both days of the conference
• Networking opportunities, including happy hours and poster sessions

Early bird tickets are $150 for attendees from academia, civil society and government, and $600 for attendees from industry. Ticket prices go up August 1, 2024.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE • REGISTER

Geopolitical Competition

Dunnmon, a CISAC affiliate and senior advisor to the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, spoke about the “holistic geopolitical competition” among world powers in the AI realm as these systems offer “unprecedented speed and unprecedented scale.”

“Within that security lens, there’s actually competition across the entirety of the technical AI stack,” he said.

Dunnmon said an underlying security question involves whether a given AI software is running on top of libraries that are sourced from Western companies then if software is being built on top of an underlying library stack owned by state enterprises. “That’s a different world.”

He said that “countries are competing for data, and it’s becoming a battlefield of geopolitical competition.”

Societal, Environmental Implications

Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and the director of the Center for Food Security and the Environment, said his biggest concern is about how AI might change the functioning of societies as well as possible bioterrorism.

“Any environment issue is basically a collective action problem, and you need well-functioning societies with good governance and political institutions, and if that crumbles, I don’t think we have much hope.”

On the positive aspects of AI, he said the combination of AI and synthetic biology and gene editing are starting to produce much faster production cycles of agricultural products, new breeds of animals, and novel foods. One company found how to make a good substitute for milk if pineapple, cabbage and other ingredients are used.

Lobell said that AI can understand which ships are actually illegally capturing seafood, and then they can trace that back to where they eventually offload such cargo. In addition, AI can help create deforestation-free supply chains, and AI mounted on farm tractors can help reduce 90% of the chemicals being used that pose environmental risks.

“There’s clear tangible progress being made with these technologies in the realm of the environment, and we can continue to build on that,” he added.
 

AI and Democracy

Persily, a senior fellow and co-director of FSI’s Cyber Policy Center, said, “AI amplifies the abilities of all good and bad actors in the system to achieve all the same goals they’ve always had.”

He noted, “AI is not social media,” even though it can interact with social media. Persily said AI is so much more pervasive and significant than a given platform such as Facebook. Problems arise in the areas of privacy, antitrust, bias and disinformation, but AI issues are “characteristically different” than social media.

“One of the ways that AI is different than social media is the fact that they are open-source tools. We need to think about this in a little bit of a different way, which is that it is not just a few companies that can be regulated on closed systems,” Persily said.

As a result, AI tools are available to all of us, he said. “There is the possibility that some of the benefits of AI could be realized more globally,” but there are also risks. For example, in the year and a half since OpenAI released ChatGPT, which is open sourced, child pornography has multiplied on the Internet.

“The democratization of AI will lead to fundamental challenges to establish legacy infrastructure for the governance of the propagation of content,” Persily said.

Balance of AI Power

Fukuyama pointed out that an AI lab at Stanford could not afford leading-edge technology, yet countries such as the U.S. and China have deeper resources to fund AI endeavors.

“This is something obviously that people are worried about,” he said, “whether these two countries are going to dominate the AI race and the AI world and disadvantage everybody.”

Manuel said that most of AI is now operating with voluntary governance – “patchwork” – and that dangerous things involving AI can be done now. “In the end, we’re going to have to adopt a negotiation and an arms control approach to the national security side of this.” 

Lobell said that while it might seem universities can’t stay up to speed with industry, people have shown they can reproduce those models’ performances just days after their releases.
 

On regulation — the European Union is currently weighing legislation — Persily said it would be difficult to enforce regulations and interpret risk assessments, so what is needed is a “transparency regime” and an infrastructure so civil entities have a clear view on what models are being released – yet this will be complex.

“I don’t think we even really understand what a sophisticated, full-on AI audit of these systems would look like,” he said.

Dunnmon suggested that an AI governance entity could be created that’s similar to how the U.S. Food and Drug Agency reviews pharmaceuticals before release.

In terms of AI and military conflicts, he spoke about the need for AI and humans to understand the rewards and risks involved, and in the case of the latter, how the risk compares to the “next best option.”

“How do you communicate that risk, how do you assess that risk, and how do you make sure the right person with the right equities and the right understanding of those risks is making that risk trade-off decision?” he asked.

The Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program was established in 1982 to provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary to analyze and address complex global challenges in a rapidly changing world, and to prepare the next generation of leaders for public and private sector careers in international policymaking and implementation.

Estimated $18 Billion Reconstruction 

To begin with, projected reconstruction costs to rebuild Gaza currently total $18 billion, said Galit Cohen, director of the Program on Climate Change at the Israel Institute for National Security. She has experience identifying and analyzing risks and opportunities for Israel’s national security in the field of climate change.

Water, sewage, waste, food and air pollution risks abound in Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Cohen said. At least 57 percent of water, sanitation and health facilities in Gaza have been destroyed so far, including desalinization plants, and only 3-7 liters of water is typically available per day for each person, which is well below the recommended minimum of 50-100 liters.

“In the current situation in regard to the environmental issues, it's about the water security and about the sewage, sanitation and construction waste – all the list of those issues that need to be mitigated and also dealt with,” Cohen said. For example, “there is no active wastewater treatment facility now in Gaza,” and the many unclaimed dead bodies deep in the rubble pose environmental risks as well.

As for solutions, she said, “Trying to build the institutions and the government that can undertake the responsibility of the civil society there” is the first step to working together on a rebuild of Gaza. The goal should be to create a new coalition with the U.S. and countries such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE, and Saudi Arabia (and others) that can undertake a reconstruction of Gaza so Palestinians can live there without enduring an environmental catastrophe.

“This is the only way we can survive here – Israel and all the rest,” Cohen said.
 

Coalition Building

Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, director of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, described the sensitive environmental interdependence of countries in the region.

“The streams and rivers originating in Israel and the West Bank originate in Jordan, and in Israel the vast majority of the aquifers of underground water in our region is shared between Israel and its neighbors – between Jordan and its neighbors, and it’s shared between Palestine and its neighbors. That means if there’s an environmental challenge or an environmental issue with the water that we have, one country alone cannot deal with it. Regional cooperation is a must,” he said.

Dr. Hamed has served as the Israeli Ministry of Science’s Deputy Chief Scientist, and later the Acting Chief Scientist, and was the highest ranking Palestinian in the Israeli government. About his current position at the Arava Institute, he said, “We use the environment as a tool. We use science as [a] diplomacy tool to bring people together. We use science to build bridges, to build trust, and to build understanding.”

The regional effects in climate change could be exacerbated by the war in Gaza, he said. “The region that we live in is a hotspot when it comes to climate change, the heat waves, and the sea level rise.”

The warming of the Eastern Mediterranean is increasing, and it is already much higher than any other place in the world, he said. On top of this, climate change often produces migration to other areas, creating possible instability effects for existing populations in the new areas, and statistics show people already have been moving out of Gaza and other countries in the immediate region, likely due to the worsening climate, and in addition now, to the conflict.

He said the intense bombing of Gaza has significantly damaged farmlands, infrastructure, including apartment buildings, the roads, water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants and water wells. “What happened on Oct. 7 happened because of the lack of knowledge of the other side.” 

He added, “This is a great chance for us to rethink what happened and to rebuild a better future for all of us.”
 

Renewable Energy Concerns – or Opportunity?

The war in Gaza seriously affects the prospect of green or renewable energy in the immediate conflict area, said Dorit Banet, who co-founded the Eilat-Eilot Renewable Energy Initiative and has been Israel’s leading government official in the area of renewable energy for two decades.

More than 100,000 Israelis were estimated to be displaced from their homes in southern Israel after Oct. 7. Banet has noted in prior media stories that some in Israel are eying a push to “build back better” by transforming the region into a more sustainable area. Israel has committed to reaching 30% renewable energy by 2030, though that may be difficult.

Banet said at least another 2 gigawatts of solar renewable energy could be immediately produced in one particular Israeli area based on the existing infrastructure – and eventually as much as another 8.5 gigawatts of solar energy. 

This would offer people in the area much more energy resilience, she said. “In such areas, this needs to be totally agreed upon with totally new regulation in Israel.”
 

Promoting Resilience

Victor Weiss, director of sustainability for the Israel National Security Council, said the ongoing war could have a negative impact on the global economy, the availability of budget, and the willingness of countries to allocate resources to climate issues.   

“A regional war is expected to affect fuel markets and lead to damaged supply chains” and the general instability of markets, said Weiss, who was a senior military officer and founder of the Israel Defense Force’s Environmental Unit.

“We have to build a new relationship and partnerships with the other regional countries to promote resilience,” he added.

Weiss said that Israel’s National Security Council recently defined climate issues as a strategic threat to that country’s national security. “The climate chapter was written in the National Security Council Risk Assessment and the main threats were mapped. We are working to define the threats, to formulate the national response to those threats,” he said.

An opportunity exists for Israel, Gaza and every population affected by this conflict to “go forward on the hope of an optimistic future to our region,” he said.

‘Powerful, Informative’

In closing, Prof. Diamond described the discussion as “very powerful, informative and in the end, also moving” for the audience. “There’s going to be a staggering challenge of reconstruction when this war is over, and hopefully we can get started on it as soon as possible.”

Alon Tal added, “We’ve only begun this discussion about the reconstruction. Let’s hope that very quickly we can end the destruction, the death and the suffering, and move forward to a time of renewal.”
 

The full webinar of "Environmental Lessons and Implications of the Gaza War" is available to view below.