Overview
Vincent Ialenti is an anthropologist who studies how nuclear energy and weapons waste organizations reckon with deep time, build governance architectures, and sustain continuity into 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 $24 million program supporting twelve project teams drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector to advance public engagement and build community capacity for siting spent nuclear fuel facilities. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University in Finland. From 2027 to 2030, he will join the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies.
Ialenti is the author of Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020), which examines how Finland's spent nuclear fuel repository safety case experts grappled with the limits of knowledge as they modeled distant future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. He has also conducted a multi-year ethnographic study examining the technopolitical, financial, and temporal drivers behind U.S. transuranic nuclear weapons waste drum dbreach accidents. In 2027, MIT Press will publish his second book, Longstorming: Beyond the Age of Haste.
Prior to his federal service, Ialenti was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, the University of British Columbia, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities. His work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, N Square Collaborative, and the Berggruen Institute. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and an MSc from the London School of Economics.
Ialenti has published with MIT Press, American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, Physics Today, Nuclear Technology, Science & Technology Studies, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Nature Geoscience, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His work has been featured by the BBC, Scientific American, NPR, Science, Forbes, Psyche, Public Radio International, ABC Radio Australia, and other outlets.
Ialenti serves on the Advisory Board for Linköping University's Swedish Research Council project "Managing Eternity? Accountability in the Deep Time Management of Nuclear Waste" and on the Management Committee of the European Union COST Action "Terra Atomica: Exploring the Afterlives of Nuclear Landscapes in Europe."
Vincent Ialenti's Academia.edu Page
Publications
Selected Publications
2022. “Boiling Sand, Metallic Fire: Technopolitics & Temporal Form in an Idaho Nuclear Waste Accident.” American Ethnologist 49(3).
2021. “Drum Breach: Error Politics, Operational Temporalities, and WIPP’s Kitty Litter Nuclear Waste Accident.” Social Studies of Science 51(3).
2021. “Mankala Chronicles: Nuclear Energy Financing & Cooperative Corporate Form in Finland.” Nuclear Technology: Journal of The American Nuclear Society 207(9).
2021. "Delving Into Deep Time." Nature Geosciences 14.
2020. Deep Time Reckoning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
2020. “Specters of Seppo: The Afterlives of Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(2).
2019. “Alter-Ecologies: Envisioning Papal & Ecomodernist Nuclear Energy Policy Futures.” In Care for the World: Laudato Si & Catholic Social Thought in an Era of Climate Crisis (ed. Frank Pasquale). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
2018. “Waste Makes Haste: How a Campaign to Speed up Nuclear Waste Shipments Shut Down the WIPP Long-Term Repository.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 74(4).
2017. “Death & Succession Among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts.” Physics Today 70(10).
2014. “Adjudicating Deep Time: Revisiting the United States’ High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project at Yucca Mountain.” Science & Technology Studies 27(2).