In 1987, the US federal government decreed that all the nation’s commercial nuclear waste would be consolidated in a repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, within ten years.
“There was no community engagement in terms of getting consent to host the waste,” said Destiny White, a master’s student in the Department of Nuclear Engineering (NE). “They told Nevada, ‘This is where the waste is going to be stored; local communities must simply deal with it.’”
The Nevada government and the Western Shoshone Tribe, which holds title to the land Yucca Mountain stands on, fiercely fought the federal decision for decades. In 2011, the Obama administration halted the siting and instructed the Department of Energy (DOE) to find a more ethical way to site radioactive waste.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 codified changes to the way the DOE approaches nuclear waste cleanup and management, like asking for input from communities near potential waste storage sites early in the planning process.
Making sure that nuclear engineers select the most ethical path to achieve their energy and defense goals is a large component of nuclear justice, a movement that brings environmental and social justice into the nuclear military-industrial complex.
“The DOE is becoming very mindful in taking lessons from past injustices to proceed in an environmentally and socially just way,” White said. “To make this work, there’s going to need to be a lot of nuclear engineers with nuclear justice at the forefront of their minds.”
White researches how to effectively incorporate nuclear justice into existing undergraduate NE education, investigating how that impacts students’ effectiveness in the evolving workforce and their own sense of belonging in the field. Her University of Tennessee mentor, NE Professor Howard Hall, leads UT’s Institute for Nuclear Security (INS), which emphasizes multidisciplinary approaches to important issues in nuclear engineering and safety.
“Ethical considerations are part of our curricula and our expectations for our graduates,” said Hall. “Destiny’s work is bringing us important data on how we can better cover and advance the issues of ethics in our profession and pedagogy.”
White’s work is also supported by the Y-12 National Security Complex, one of the charter members of the INS, where she receives additional mentorship from nuclear nonproliferation expert Chantell Murphy.
“Destiny’s work is something that the nuclear industry values and that we are interested in implementing,” Murphy said.
Hard Historical Lessons Create More Just Future
During her junior year at Purdue University, White was one of just two NE majors enrolled in a nuclear history course taught by historian and legal scholar Mary X Mitchell.
“During one class, she shared the story of the US testing nuclear weapons in the Republic of the Marshall Islands during the Cold War,” White said. “She approached it in a way that was very focused on the Marshallese perspective.”
From 1946 to 1958, the US tested 67 nuclear devices in the Marshall Islands. During this time, the US forcibly relocated many Marshallese communities and performed nonconsensual radiation studies on them. The tests also vaporized three islands of the Bikini Atoll, including some traditional burial sites, representing not just a loss of land but of cultural history.
“Hearing that story inspired me to apply my nuclear knowledge to justice,” White said. “If we can be mindful of how the industry’s past perpetuated harm, we can go forward and prevent that in the future.”
Nuclear Justice Prioritizes Personal Connection
When White began looking for a master’s program, she signed up for a nuclear engineering graduate school recruitment email list for Purdue undergraduates. While most schools sent generic invitations to informational webinars, NE Associate Department Head Jamie Coble wrote a personal message that resonated with White. That positive first impression was the start of many conversations that led White to choose UT as her graduate school.
That same desire for personal connection drives White’s research. She believes that it is a universal need—one that is rarely filled for nuclear engineers who come from minority racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds, but which can be addressed through nuclear justice.
“As a Black woman, I am often the only person in the room who looks like me and thinks about nuclear engineering in a social justice, community, and diversity-oriented way,” White said. “Nuclear justice is a way to make nuclear engineers more mindful of how they engage with people who don’t look like them, who have different perspectives than them, and who may have a history of nuclear trauma that makes them a lot more hesitant to engage with nuclear projects.”
For her master’s thesis, White studied publicly available course descriptions for NE classes at various universities and investigated the relationship between students’ identities and their desire to learn about nuclear justice. Her research revealed that learning nuclear justice is important to students of all gender, racial, and social backgrounds.
“Talking about nuclear justice is a way to engage nuclear engineering students in the social element of engineering that they will encounter in the workforce,” White said. “It’s evident in the literature but also in my lived experience.”
Small Changes Deliver Big Impacts
Although her first exposure to nuclear justice was in a history course, White has identified several ways that NE professors can incorporate nuclear justice into engineering curricula.
For example, most NE courses she researched included a colloquium or seminar component, where students listen to lectures from professors, researchers, or industry experts.
“These colloquia could be expanded to include social scientists and science communicators who work in the nuclear field,” White said. “Students could also engage with anti-nuclear groups, or groups that have been adversely impacted by nuclear projects, in roundtable discussions to gain experience defending their science and their points of view in a respectful dialogue.”
White also recommends incorporating social aspects into the engineering problem statements that are often presented as homework assignments or classroom examples. In addition to solving mathematical equations, professors could challenge students to consider how they might approach a community that has had either positive or challenging experiences with nuclear engineers and organizations in the past.
In her work, White emphasizes the importance of nuclear justice not only to address the nation’s energy goals in an ethical way, but to make sure the industry is retaining talented workers from all backgrounds.
“Learning about nuclear justice was my lifeline for remaining in NE,” White said. “I have felt most confident of my decision to persist in the field when I am able to embody my full identity as an equity-oriented Black woman in addition to a ‘nuclear engineer.’ I do this work because I want nuclear scientists of all identities and backgrounds to feel that they can also be their full selves.”
Contact
Izzie Gall (865-974-7203, egall4@utk.edu)