The Reactor Around the Corner: Understanding Advanced Nuclear Energy Futures

The Reactor Around the Corner – Public Webinar

December 11, 2025

(Transcript lightly edited for clarity)

[00:00:02]

Shobita Parthasarathy:

Hi, everyone! Welcome!

Before we begin, I just want to let you know that today's webinar includes live closed captioning. You can view captions in two ways. Through Zoom, or via an external browser link, which we're sharing in the chat. If you're accessing captions within Zoom, click on the CC, or Show Captions button on your main Zoom menu. Typically, this is at the bottom of your Zoom window. From there, you can turn captions on and off and adjust their size.

It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's webinar on the new report published by University of Michigan's Science, Technology, and Public Policy program in collaboration with the Fastest Path to Zero initiative. It's called The Reactor Around the Corner, Understanding Advanced Nuclear Energy Futures. My name is Shobita Parthasarathy, and I'm Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program, known as STPP, at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at University of Michigan.

STPP is an interdisciplinary, university-wide program dedicated to training students, conducting cutting-edge research, and informing the public and policymakers on issues at the intersection of technology, science, equity, society, and public policy. The Fastest Path to Zero Initiative is housed within the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department at the College of Engineering here at the University of Michigan, and supports research, policy, and tool development related to zero-carbon energy sources. If you'd like to learn more about either program, the links for both are in the chat.

So to give you a sense of today's agenda, we'll start with remarks from Denia Djokić, the lead on this project. We'll then hear short presentations from the rest of the research team, highlighting the findings of our report, and ending with recommendations for more robust governance of advanced nuclear energy. We'll then open it up to audience Q&A, and as we go along, please feel free to enter your questions in the Q&A box while you're thinking of them.

So together with STPP's Managing Director, who is this year serving as interim director while I'm on sabbatical, Molly Kleinman, I launched the Technology Assessment Project in 2019. TAP, as we call it, rests on the idea, developed first in the academic field of science and technology studies, that there are patterns in how technologies are developed and deployed in society, and in their implications. We argue that understanding these patterns by analyzing both historical and contemporary cases can help us anticipate the implications of emerging technologies. We call this the Analogical Case Study, or ACS, approach. Before The Reactor Around the Corner, we published 3 other reports developing our method on facial recognition technology in schools, vaccine hesitancy, and in April of 2022, on large language models. In fact, we published it a few months before ChatGPT was launched, and it actually anticipated a lot of what we've all experienced over the last few years.

Our approach has brought new dimensions into the public and policy conversations about these technologies, and we hope that the newest report will do the same. Key to our approach is our interdisciplinary research teams and our commitment to training students in these methods. And more broadly, to think creatively about and critically about the relationships between technology, society, and public policy. And you'll certainly see that in our research team on The Reactor Around the Corner report. Denia Djokić will tell you more in a second, but Molly and I were thrilled when she said that she wanted to use the ACS method to study advanced nuclear energy and lead the project, and let me just say that she did an extraordinary job.

Let me tell you a little bit more about this ACS method that we're developing here at Michigan. It's part of a growing suite of efforts that aim to anticipate the implications of emerging technologies in order to ensure that their development and governance are responsible, particularly in an era of growing public discontent about emerging technologies. ACS builds on academic scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, and particularly in science and technology studies, as I said before, which have demonstrated how societies shape technology, down to even the most technical details, and how technologies have profound moral and social implications. Further, even though we often hear about unanticipated risks and unintended consequences, we argue that these relationships can in fact be anticipated. There are patterns in how societies shape, engage with, and are shaped by technologies, which remain relatively stable over time and within a national context. This includes how technologies affect communities, and how communities manage technology, but also includes the kinds of concerns and resistance that might arise, as well as the solutions that might be feasible with emerging innovation.

There's more detail on the method in our reports, but we generally begin by looking at technologies that are similar in form or function to the emerging technology, but also in terms of the projected implications. So in this case, we didn't just look at the history of nuclear power, but we looked at the history of other forms of energy. And eventually, as these cases made us think of our other cases, the team looked at, as you'll hear today, everything from the Green Revolution to Atlanta's Cop City to understand parallels.

In sum, by deliberately considering the histories of analogical technologies across sectors, the ACS approach identifies relevant social patterns in how technologies develop, how they're implemented, and how they affect societies. It also allows us to identify successful social and policy approaches to managing technological harms and maximizing benefits.

And now, to get us started, I'll turn it over to Denia to talk about our TAP report, The Reactor Around the Corner: Understanding Advanced Nuclear Energy Futures.

[00:06:55]

Denia Djokić:

Thank you so much, Shobita, for starting this off so wonderfully. Hi everybody, I'm Denia Djokić, and I'm a research scientist at the Fastest Path to Zero Initiative, as Shobita mentioned. I've had the honor to have led this project and brilliant research team for the past two years.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to everyone today. You just met Shobita, Professor of Public Policy and Director of STPP. You will also all shortly meet Molly Kleinman, the Managing Director of STPP, and our wonderful University of Michigan student research assistants. Nora Lewis, the first author of our report, and who really did a lot of the heavy lifting and the writing of this report, is a graduate of the Public Policy program at the Ford School. Dr. Txai Sibley, recently graduated with a PhD in Material Science Engineering, and we are all very excited about that. Nicholas Stubblefield is a graduate of the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department, which is also my home department. And Michael Redmond, who graduated with a Master's of Engineering in Applied Climate.

We are also immensely grateful to our funders, the Graham Sustainability Institute Carbon Neutrality Acceleration Program, the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for supporting this work.

So, when we started working on this report two and a bit years ago, advanced nuclear energy was gaining attention, though it wasn't nearly as prominent in the public discourse and imagination as it is today. Interest in these technologies has since accelerated, especially with the promises that these new reactors could power data centers for AI, as well as address global energy insecurity and the climate crisis.

This has created new challenges, and also new responsibilities. These new reactors have the potential to reshape our energy landscape, so we need to put responsible regulation and governance in place before they are widely adopted. The goal of our research was to make sure that we're asking questions about how these might impact and reshape society up front, so we can proactively inform governance, rather than letting policy lag behind widespread adoption.

But what actually is advanced nuclear energy? Our audience today spans all levels of familiarity with nuclear energy, so I'll briefly go over the basics for newcomers to advanced nuclear. In the public discourse, the term advanced nuclear energy broadly refers to new, or in some cases, recently reimagined nuclear reactors, some of which were first developed some decades ago, actually. But they are just now starting to be more widely constructed commercially by governments, the established nuclear industry, and also new nuclear startups. Big tech companies have also recently started supporting their development. These new reactors are commonly advertised as solving nuclear power's greatest issues: waste, cost, safety, and weapons proliferation concerns, with the hope that they'll also, more fundamentally, address the climate crisis and our ever-growing energy needs. While the technical categories of different types of advanced reactors are a bit blurry, we most often talk about small modular reactors, or SMRs, and sometimes microreactors, that are designed to be smaller in power output and sometimes size than conventional reactors. They are marketed as more affordable and adaptable because of their modularity and flexibility. Advocates claim that they could easily be exported to countries or remote communities that may not otherwise be able to afford or build large conventional reactors.

However, as attractive as these promises may seem, there is much debate over their viability, timelines, and whether they truly solve nuclear power's long-standing challenges. Also, missing from many discussions is what the broader social, environmental, ethical, equity, economic, and geopolitical implications of a widespread adoption of advanced nuclear energy may be.

To understand these dimensions before these technologies are widely out there, we studied approximately 40 historical and contemporary cases of technologies in society, using the analogical case study method that Shobita just described. For each case we studied, we asked questions like, well, what happens when new technologies are adopted? What values shape their development, and who benefits and who is harmed?

Our main findings show that SMRs are likely to introduce, and in some cases reinforce, problems that technological solutions alone will not be able to fix. My co-authors will describe these in more details for you shortly, but the bottom line is, unless we proactively intervene with policies that ensure the most vulnerable are not harmed, then new nuclear power is in danger of repeating history. With many new advanced reactor projects being announced recently around the world, it is important that we act fast to build new—and strengthen existing—governance frameworks to minimize harm, and not roll back nuclear regulation, as, for example, is happening in the United States right now.

I invite you all to read the full report to get a better idea of how we learned from these case studies exactly, and please stay tuned for our full case study library coming soon to the STPP website. There's also a Further Reading appendix, if you're interested in more technical details about advanced reactors.

So, with our report, we aim to expand the political debate about advanced nuclear energy beyond simply accepting or rejecting these technologies. We do not want to get stuck at "SMRs are bad, old reactors are good", or vice versa, or "we have to build out new nuclear fast, no matter what, and just hope that governance catches up eventually", or not. Instead, we want the broader conversation to include questions like: How likely are we to govern these emerging nuclear technologies responsibly? Can we prioritize good governance and ethical considerations from the start, rather than as an afterthought? How will they reshape our societies if we don't? And are we willing to accept those likely impacts?

Also, good governance isn't just a box to check. It should be central to our vision for our technological futures. It is essential that we shape these futures so that technologies benefit people, and not just serve the interests of the few and the powerful.

So, thank you, and I'll now pass it on to Michael to share our first few report findings.

[00:13:22]

Michael Redmond:

Hi, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm going to cover our chapter Entrenching Global Disparities. The headline is pretty simple: Small modular reactors are being pitched as a new, more flexible path to low-carbon energy, both for developed and for rapidly developing nations. However, our case research suggests that they're also a new vehicle for an old story, reinforcing global power hierarchies through infrastructure, finance, and control over critical technology and resources.

Let me start with the chapter's first takeaway, SMRs as geopolitical tools.

So, when a country exports an SMR, it isn't just exporting a reactor. It's exporting a bundle. Financing, construction, training, operation, fuel supply, maintenance contracts, regulatory expertise, and whoever controls that bundle generates a tremendous amount of long-term leverage. The countries best positioned to do this are the same ones that already dominate the nuclear infrastructure and global supply chains, notably the United States, Russia, and China.

We see these dynamics in energy infrastructure more broadly. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a clear example of how energy projects can be designed not only for efficiency, but for strategic dependence and leverage for coercion. The lesson isn't that all infrastructure is coercive. It's that infrastructure can be built and financed in specific ways that deliberately narrow a recipient's options and increase an exporter's leverage.

And when you add nuclear to the picture with its specialized expertise, long project timelines, and security sensitivities, that dependency risk increases. If an SMR deal is structured so that the exporting state or its state-backed firms finance the project, build it, and operate it for decades, the importing state may gain electrons on the grid, but it may also lose autonomy over the terms of its energy future.

The second takeaway of this chapter is that SMRs can enable neocolonial relationships, a new form for older extractive patterns. In this chapter, we describe neocolonialism as an indirect control, exercised through finance, through technology, and political relationships, rather than direct rule. We also draw on the idea of techno-colonialism, the way that technology transfer can entrench power by positioning wealthy states as the source of technical solutions, and other countries as passive recipients of turnkey systems they can't fully govern.

Our key case study here is the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam in Ecuador. It was promoted as a symbol of modernization and energy sovereignty, and it was framed as an alternative to Western-dominated finance institutions. China financed most of the project, and a Chinese state-owned company built it under conditions that required Chinese labor, suppliers, and expertise. In other words, it was a turnkey project—it was fast, centralized, and externally controlled. But technical problems and delayed transfer of ownership meant that Ecuador did not gain the level of capacity it was promised. At the same time, repayment structures tied Ecuador's future to commodity extraction, including oil shipments, which can drive deeper extractive dependence and environmental harm.

If a reactor export package is financed by a foreign state bank, built and operated by a foreign vendor, fueled through external supply contracts, and maintained through long-term service agreements, the importing country can be locked into dependency across the entire fuel cycle for decades. And even if this is not the relationship presented up front, the nature of this kind of technology allows for this relationship to emerge once the client state has already staked its future.

The third takeaway of this chapter is that local benefits in recipient countries are unlikely to materialize without stronger regulation and governance, because integration is rarely equitable or context-driven.

A useful historical parallel here is Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat, often credited as the spark that ignited the Green Revolution. It's a case where an internationally promoted tech fix did increase output and reduce hunger in some contexts, but it also showed how technology transfer can reshape local systems in ways that concentrate benefits and externalize costs. High-yield wheat packages were tied to a larger model of agriculture: intensive irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide dependence, external expertise. Countries and regions with strong domestic research institutions and infrastructure were much better positioned to adapt these varieties to local needs and contexts, while places with weaker capacity saw delayed uptake and fewer gains. Even where yields rose, the distribution of prosperity was uneven, with wealth and decision-making power tending to concentrate among landowners and political and agribusiness elites.

So for SMRs, the implication is that modularity and deployability does not automatically equal accessibility. Without strong domestic institutions—regulatory capacity, workforce development, industrial strategy, transparent contracting, community consent processes—the "local benefit" story is simply promotional language that hides a lopsided reality: that profits, expertise, and strategic leverage consolidate with exporters and domestic elites, while risks, costs, and long-term obligations diffuse downward.

So, the chapter's conclusion is not "don't cooperate internationally", and it's not "new technology imports are always bad". It's that SMRs are likely to intensify existing global disparities unless governance catches up to the geopolitical reality of how these projects are financed, built, fueled, and controlled.

If countries want SMRs to serve energy security and climate goals, rather than reinforce existing hierarchies, they will need stronger leadership and regulation up front. That means transparent contracts, limits on predatory financing, real requirements for domestic capacity building beyond headline training programs, protection against resource-for-debt extraction traps, and credible plans for long-term waste and decommissioning responsibilities that don't quietly shift burdens onto less powerful communities and states.

And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Nicholas.

[00:19:36]

Nicholas Stubblefield:

Thank you, Michael, and hello, everyone. So our third chapter in the report, Privileging Markets Over the Public Good, is built around three primary takeaways from our cases. The first, the SMR industry will intentionally prioritize economic over public interest. The second, SMR industry will escape stringent regulatory oversight, and SMRs will reinforce racial capitalism.

These first two takeaways directly contradict what are widely ubiquitous industry claims that SMRs will be safer than traditional nuclear reactors, primarily because of their specific technical features. Fewer components that reduce maintenance needs, small reactor cores that limit the amount of nuclear material, and the use of passive safety systems.

These technical promises, however, obscure the immense economic pressures the SMR industry is likely to face, and is already facing. Economic pressures which, as our cases demonstrate, usually lead to industries undermining the public good and jeopardizing health and public safety.

The development of Boeing's 737 MAX jet is an illustrative case here. Like SMRs, Boeing began development on its MAX jet among intense financial pressure in a highly competitive market environment. These financial pressures created a developmental timeline littered with shortcuts, cost cuts, and labor cuts that made for a sloppy, under-engineered plane. But perhaps most damning, Boeing concealed changes to its MCAS software, which controlled the pitch of the plane in flight, from regulators. The software changes should have triggered the Federal Aviation Administration to require expensive training courses for pilots, courses that would lower the plane's market value. So instead of eating the cost, Boeing misled the FAA and concealed these changes, a decision that would cascade into two major plane crashes.

So we see a prioritization of profit over safety also motivates regulatory evasions. But what mechanisms will allow the SMR industry to escape regulation and even influence industry-friendly regulatory regimes? One is an expertise deficit, where regulatory standards and staff lag behind the rapid innovations and knowledge of a highly technical industry, causing regulators to lean on that industry for support.

In fact, for the Boeing case, an understaffed and under-resourced FAA relied on Boeing to designate its own internal regulators, which allowed the company to control information flow between industry and government. And for most of the world, light water reactor technology has dominated the commercial nuclear energy market, and regulating agencies have developed expertise and deployed standards based on that technology.

Advanced reactor designs, like SMRs, promise evolutionary and revolutionary changes to the way we generate commercial nuclear power. But the introduction of these designs means regulators do not have as thorough a knowledge and understanding of these technologies as the developers. This has and will likely continue to lead regulators to rely on the private sector for this expertise, a clear conflict of interest that serves industry goals.

Another mechanism is public interest or crisis framing. The post-Industrial Revolution world boasts a rich history of developers framing technologies as advancing national goals, so as to avoid government oversight. This is an easily identifiable trend in SMR development. Where industry has already framed their technology as boosting innovation and economic competitiveness, providing energy, infrastructure, and national security, and mitigating climate change. But promises to meet our most urgent security and energy needs is also a tactic to gain government support at the expense of oversight. As such, oversight will be viewed as harming innovation, not to mention achieving the goals of national security and climate change.

And our third takeaway, we also expect SMRs to reinforce racial capitalism, despite industry promises of equitable energy distribution and accessible benefits. Racial capitalism is the process of deriving economic and social value at the expense of racialized identities, which largely equates to maintaining historic inequities and prevailing systems of power.

Our cases here highlight how industries, institutions, and governments use disparate valuations of different racial identities to concentrate technological harms among these racialized groups. To understand the influence of racial capitalism and SMR development, we explored several large-scale energy infrastructure projects.

I'll highlight the Dakota Access Pipeline, DAPL, a notorious example of offloading harms to tribal reservations, and the relative ease with which institutions do it. DAPL proposals originally ran the pipeline over a stretch of river just north of Bismarck, North Dakota's overwhelmingly white capital. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, though, rejected that path, and instead rerouted the pipeline onto tribal territory. Yet when tribes protested the new placement, law enforcement brutally suppressed them. The pipeline was built and travels now beneath the Missouri River reservoir that the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Reservations use for drinking water.

See, when developers shift and concentrate project risks to racialized groups, they demonstrate distinct disparities in their racialized valuations of these groups. SMRs specifically depend both on the land and labor of marginalized communities for its uranium supply and processing, and disproportionately place burdens on racialized identities. Uranium mining, especially in the United States, largely takes place on Indigenous land. But industry promises of unprecedented deployments in remote areas and bridging gaps in energy distribution and accessibility don't mention the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle and the harms perpetuated there. As SMRs become more popular, upstream harms concentrated among racialized groups will only increase.

I'll turn it now to Txai, who will speak on SMR's environmental impacts.

[00:25:36]

Txai Sibley:

Thank you, Nicholas. So, SMRs are often assumed to have clear environmental benefits, based on the presumption that any technology that reduces carbon emissions is inherently good for the environment. And while carbon reduction is a crucial aspect of environmental stewardship, our case study work indicates that understanding the environmental and health impacts of a technology requires examining the broader social, ecological, and industrial systems in which it will be deployed.

So, the first finding of the chapter focusing on environmental impacts of SMRs is what we call the climate-environment paradox, which is when climate action, particularly when it emphasizes carbon reduction, can ultimately entrench and introduce environmental harms. There's often a rhetorical conflation of environmental stewardship and carbon reduction, when, in fact, industries can be engineered to emit very little carbon, but can still persist in causing extensive environmental damages.

One case study we used to explore this was carbon capture technology. Carbon capture is often promoted as a green technology because it reduces the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by trapping emissions at their source. However, in practice, it can ultimately perpetuate environmentally harmful, carbon-intensive industries, as 70-90% of captured carbon is used for enhanced oil recovery techniques like fracking.

In the case of SMRs, we could see the climate-environment paradox play out through the co-siting of environmentally harmful industries, such as data centers, chemical processing facilities, and oil refineries with SMRs. In other words, there is a potential for this technology to greenwash environmentally harmful industries. This could lead to an increase in industrial activity that is legitimized by low carbon production, resulting in cyclical industrial expansion and compounding environmental harms.

We also identified the potential for extensive environmental injustices along the nuclear supply chain. In particular, as Nicholas identified, SMRs are supported by crisis framing, particularly climate and energy sovereignty crises. Crisis rhetoric has historically put marginalized groups at heightened risks of resource extraction and unjust land use. This is because the land of the politically and economically disenfranchised can be used disproportionately to achieve national goals. When land is regarded as less valuable or already damaged, it can be used as a so-called "sacrifice zone." For instance, during highway construction in America, areas where Black communities lived were seen as "blighted" by the government, justifying land seizure for the greater technological good of the highway.

Similarly, the human health and environmental risks posed by uranium mining and transport, particularly in or near Native communities whose land has already been damaged by prior mining, could be seen as necessary trade-offs for addressing climate change and increasing energy security. Energy transition communities, and especially Native communities, are therefore at heightened risk for any health and environmental harms associated with the nuclear supply chain, and also with co-sited industries.

This harm could then be compounded by the burden of self-advocacy, as our case studies indicate that marginalized groups are often left without institutional or governmental support in redressing environmental and health harms. For example, deploying SMRs in former coal towns could introduce additional health risks from co-sited industries. And in many such low-income rural areas, maintaining and advocating for community health is already a significant challenge. Native communities along the supply chain already struggle with the environmental and health damages caused by the legacy of uranium mining. Those struggles could be further intensified by the deployment of SMRs, which would likely expand domestic uranium production. Moreover, dissent and advocacy of affected communities risks being criminalized, as evidenced by the treatment of protesters during the aforementioned Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrations.

Furthermore, multiple case studies indicate that communities made most vulnerable by resource extraction and industrial co-siting with SMRs are the least likely to receive equitable energy access. Target communities for SMR deployment include struggling coal communities. Rural communities have older, less reliable grid infrastructure, and we identified that co-sited industries, such as data centers, will likely have their electrical needs prioritized.

This has happened before. We consider the case of the Moses-Saunders Dam, which was, constructed on land seized from the now-adjacent Akwesasne people. Although the dam provides consistent hydroelectric power to nearby industrial facilities, nearby Native communities are not guaranteed reliable, cheap power. As a result, they suffer through blackouts, often during winter, leaving elders and other medically vulnerable community members with heightened health risks.

In sum, we identified that SMRs could exacerbate environmental harms, particularly through industrial co-siting. We also found that environmental and health harms will likely be concentrated in marginalized communities, and that those same communities are less likely to reap the energy benefits from SMRs.

My colleague Nora will now elaborate on other ways that we anticipate communities being impacted by the deployment of this technology.

[00:31:18]

Nora Lewis:

Thank you, Txai.

So the next component that I'll be speaking about is how local and Indigenous knowledge is likely to be overlooked in the development of SMRs. So, to begin with, our report identifies tech-solutionism, or the idea that a single technology such as SMRs, are a straightforward solution to societal problems, as a concept that has historically been used to discount local knowledge in the development of technologies.

This often looks like rejecting the lived or occupational experiences of communities when they conflict with technical knowledge and the priorities of tech developers. This is particularly harmful for marginalized communities, who are already disenfranchised and have seen their concerns for new technologies and infrastructure go unaddressed throughout history.

We examined this pattern in the case of highway development in the United States, where predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods were physically divided or demolished for highway infrastructure, leading to community fragmentation, economic disenfranchisement, and heightened exposure to air pollution, all in the pursuit of national connectivity and modernization benefits. So, although SMR developers have promised to engage communities more expansively and respectfully, our cases suggest that this will be difficult to accomplish, especially when community knowledge conflicts with scientific risk assessments and tech-solutionist hierarchies of expertise.

Additionally, our report finds that SMR expansion will likely extend settler colonialism through the nuclear industry's growing need for uranium. We define settler colonialism as the extension of power through the exploitation of Indigenous lands for resource extraction and settlement. This system treats Indigenous land and communities as acceptable collateral for progress and national development, a framing which has shaped global uranium mining practices greatly, given that 70% of all uranium deposits worldwide are located on Indigenous land.

At the same time, SMR proponents point to a pressing need for more uranium to fuel advanced reactors, meaning uranium mining and milling operations must rise to meet this demand. As Txai spoke about earlier, this places disproportionate environmental and occupational safety burdens on Indigenous communities, while often failing to distribute economic and employment benefits to them.

In the case of lithium mining used for EV battery production happening in South America's Atacama Plateau, mining has drained the region of water and displaced Indigenous communities, while failing to pass on widespread permanent employment opportunities, local economic benefits, or regional access to EVs. Yet, these harms persist in the name of innovative green technology development, which, in the case of EVs, tend to only be accessible in the wealthiest and most powerful nations.

Because SMR developers purport that their technology will make society more resilient and prosperous, Indigenous resistance to the burdens of uranium mining and milling will likely be obscured or seen as out of step with national energy goals as a result. Our findings suggest that without comprehensive environmental and workers' protections, as well as the remediation of polluted uranium mining sites, SMRs will extend the most extractive aspects of settler colonialism.

And finally, our report finds that SMR developers are likely to devalue Indigenous knowledge. Over generations, Indigenous peoples have developed shared traditions, experiences, and beliefs related to the land that have enabled, for example, a deep understanding of the environment, its patterns, and how to use natural resources to sustain life while maintaining healthy ecosystems. While settler colonialism relies on extracting resources for maximized profits and expanded global influence, Indigenous knowledge emphasizes respect for the land and a balanced use of resources.

Our case study examining Indigenous fire management practices, which includes prescribed burns to promote plant growth and combat large, uncontrolled forest fires, finds that the United States government has historically banned Indigenous burn practices, in some past cases even making them subject to criminalization or death. Yet, as global temperatures rise and wildfires become more frequent, the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior have recently begun to embrace these practices for their invaluable role in curbing forest fires, and have forged collaborations with Indigenous organizations promoting the upkeep of these burning traditions.

As SMR development drives uranium extraction on Indigenous land, developers are likely to devalue Indigenous knowledge that promotes healthier ecosystems in pursuit of technological growth. We believe that developers should take Indigenous burning practices as a model, and be willing to unlearn dominant extractive resource approaches, support organizations focused on Indigenous knowledge and heed their recommendations, and also be willing to stop the expansion of uranium mining and milling when it conflicts with Indigenous knowledge.

Without considering both Indigenous and local knowledge, SMR developers will simply perpetuate the nuclear industry's history of disengaged and unpopular projects. Both governments and developers must create frameworks to ensure that the voices of marginalized communities are heard and respected throughout the nuclear fuel cycle. And in the long run, these measures will improve environmental sustainability, social equity, and public trust.

So, the second component I'll be speaking about is how SMR developers will likely abandon promises of local development and empowerment.

We expect that SMRs will fail to provide local jobs and economic development for host communities, despite promises from the industry that newly built plants will unlock new careers and stimulate local economies, specifically in communities transitioning away from coal and in need of jobs.

We find that nuclear expertise is not easily transferable, with plant jobs often requiring licensing exams, at least one year of on-site training, and a knowledge of complex subjects such as thermodynamics and reactor theory to access the highest paying opportunities. Though coal workforces may have some transferable expertise for nuclear plant work, it is likely that workers will still need extensive retraining to qualify for nuclear plant jobs. In the United States, for example, research estimates that one quarter of all coal workers will require this extensive retraining to access plant jobs.

Additionally, we find that workforce training programs are often insufficient, and at the mercy of changing economic and political conditions. We examined the case of a partnership between the Romanian Wind Energy Association and Romanian national government, which attempted to train 8,000 coal miners to operate wind turbines as the country decommissions coal infrastructure to meet clean energy goals. When Romania's ruling coalition government collapsed while the program was still being designed, the training initiative lost government funding, and ultimately managed to send only one applicant for wind-powered training abroad, leaving thousands of ex-coal workers without promised job opportunities.

Even if local community members do manage to get specialized training for SMR work, they may not gain expertise in time for new projects built in their immediate community, or may be forced to leave their homes to train and gain experience elsewhere, minimizing local employment benefits and tax revenues. If developers over-promise an influx of related money, people, and industries in host communities, these places may be further destabilized when expectations are not met.

We also find that the SMR industry will likely cite its riskiest infrastructure and jobs in marginalized communities, exposing them to health and environmental harms. Historically, nuclear power plants in the United States have been located in wealthy white communities, with highly educated workforces, while uranium mining and milling jobs tend to take place in low-income and less educated communities of color. Global workplace protections are inconsistent and inadequate in mining and milling industries, compared to the stringent oversight at nuclear power plants, leaving marginalized communities with lower-paying jobs and also greater occupational risks.

Protests and litigation have led to improved safety measures and regulation, as well as worker compensation programs in some places, such as the United States' Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. Yet, in the highest uranium-producing countries of Namibia and Kazakhstan, limited knowledge-sharing about uranium mining's occupational hazards, as well as government suppression of workers' unions, has diminished opportunities for miners to organize for safer conditions. As a result, we find arguments asserting that uranium mining has been sufficiently reformed in recent decades to minimize these persisting risks. Without proactive attention toward these burdens, there is little evidence that SMR developers will be able to counteract the likely inequitable distribution of nuclear's riskiest jobs, which will extend the industry's history of treating marginalized workforces as dispensable.

Finally, we anticipate that developer interests will undermine committee engagement in SMR planning, siting, and operation, and fail to foster community self-governance of nuclear energy. Many SMR proponents have expressed an aim to make nuclear energy development a more publicly engaged process, where historically, conventional nuclear projects have lacked community input and consent. Yet, we believe this will be a difficult pursuit, particularly when nuclear developers may view the governance process as too technical for communities to fully grasp and engage with.

Our cases find that disregarding public engagement and decision-making for large infrastructure projects not only leads to a sense of community distrust toward developers, but also often toward local leadership, who may act as representation for the community. This drives social and political instability, and often forces citizens to express dissent through protests and other forms of organizing. And even when developers promise to engage communities, or are required to incorporate public input into decision making, these efforts are not always meaningfully enforced, or considerate of public perspectives in tangible ways.

Developers also point to the smaller scale of SMRs as an opportunity to create greater citizen autonomy in the governance of nuclear energy, possibly enabling local cooperatives or small municipal utility companies to own reactors. Yet large, private, and state-owned utilities have dominated global nuclear power development for decades, meaning that reversing years of top-down ownership will be a difficult task.

We examined the case of Dutch water utilities as a successful example of democratic decision-making and community-based resource governance. In the Netherlands, water utilities are owned and operated by the Dutch national government, with 21 regional water boards made up of elected members of the public and other stakeholders that govern at a local level. Residents of each region elect members to their water board general body for a four-year term, and members of this general body then appoint five individuals to an executive assembly that steers policy implementation. These boards, which manage water quality, quantity, and flood protections, are autonomous and decentralized, with powers outlined in the Dutch Constitution. We find that this strong sense of trust and collaboration between government, industry, and citizens is crucial for achieving successful local governance of resources, something the Dutch case shows is possible even when highly technical infrastructure is involved.

Developers, whether public or private, are likely to prioritize scalability, efficiency, and project revenues over local needs, particularly as costs remain high and they seek to stake claim in the developing industry. We believe SMR developers must look to systems such as Dutch water governance to guide their efforts at engaging publics and fostering local governance, even when these pursuits conflict with efficiency and revenue aims.

And I will now pass the baton to Molly for our policy recommendations.

[00:43:07]

Molly Kleinman:

Thanks, Nora.

So, as we've seen from these findings, the potential implications of widespread advanced nuclear adoption extend far beyond the safety concerns that loom the largest in the public imagination, and include a wide range of social, environmental, ethical, equity, economic, and geopolitical impacts. Fortunately, our cases also provided many signposts towards robust governance models that can help SMRs fulfill their promises and ensure that their implementation serves the global public interest, rather than a few corporate and geopolitical actors.

What we have here on this slide are the six top-level recommendations we make in the report. Each of these comes with more specific and targeted recommendations, and I'll cover some of those now, but I do encourage you to dig into them on your own.

Because of the nature of nuclear development and regulation, many of these recommendations are addressed to national governments and international agencies. However, there are also clear roles for nuclear energy developers and researchers, regional utilities, state and local governments, and philanthropy. I also want to make clear that while this research team was based largely in the US, and we hope to contribute to the political debate here at home, this work was global in scope, and we developed these recommendations for countries around the world, including both nuclear exporters and nuclear importers.

Some of our recommendations require new or thoroughly revised regulatory frameworks, but some simply ask nations to enforce and abide by existing international standards. Agreements like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Rio Declaration address many of our recommendations, but countries and the industry often do not comply with them.

Now to get into the specifics. First, comprehensively manage safety and risk. When we say comprehensive, it means we need to manage safety and risk across the whole fuel cycle, from mining and milling through reactor operations and waste management. It also means considering the full range of risks to both people and the environment, and protecting communities around reactor sites and mining operations from not only environmental harms, but also workplace and labor harms. Doing this requires transparent environmental justice reviews with long time horizons, transparency for the life cycle of the uranium to ensure compliance with labor and environmental standards, and international protection guidelines that address the historical exploitation and vulnerability of Indigenous lands in particular.

Next: conduct inclusive and collaborative public participation. This is where we get at a lot of the issues around public trust and mistrust. The way to build public trust is not to explain nuclear better. It's to include and collaborate with the public in every stage, from design all the way through to waste management. These processes should empower publics to have a meaningful choice over the governance and planning of their nuclear infrastructure, up to and including community veto power. Publics have to be able to say no. That requires protecting the right to engage in civil protest about nuclear projects. As we saw in the Dakota Access Pipeline case, governments often criminalize otherwise protected speech and actions when it opposes energy infrastructure that they have deemed critical.

Part of how we enable and strengthen public inclusion is by building public capacity that can serve as a counterweight to industry dominance. We envision a pretty broad landscape of what this can look like, such as facilitating cross-sector collaborations with academia and community groups; creating financial support for networks of environmental justice organizations and even civil rights litigation firms; and fostering research on socially and ecologically robust strategies for the safe and equitable use of nuclear energy technology.

Another key piece of enabling public participation is requiring transparent evaluation of environmental and social impacts. This will require expanding the types of experts on review panels, and expanding the definition of expertise to recognize and value local and Indigenous knowledge in addition to other types of technical knowledge. As Nora described in the fire management case, even though Indigenous practices of controlled burns resulted in healthier and safer ecosystems, the U.S. Forest Service spent years not just ignoring, but actively suppressing that knowledge.

All right, so, a lot of the recommendations so far were focused more on the local and regional level. This next recommendation is largely on the nation level: Implement strong financial controls. These recommendations aim to address the implication Michael discussed earlier, that advanced nuclear has the potential to entrench global-level disparities and exacerbate neocolonial dynamics of extraction and hierarchy.

One way to do this is to limit private funding and foreign investment in the production of SMRs, so that influence over a project stays local and democratic. Prioritize investments that build domestic capacity for things like regulation and oversight, research development and deployment, and environmental justice in order to avoid long-term dependencies, those bundles that Michael was talking about when countries accept foreign investment in SMRs.

And then specifically for countries with uranium deposits that receive foreign investment for uranium extraction, prioritize domestic benefits. They could do this by establishing state-owned companies for uranium mining and processing, the profits of which should return directly to affected regions and communities. Those communities, which have historically borne all of the risk and harm associated with uranium mining and milling, would then also have the opportunity to share in the profits, and potentially invest those profits in preventing future harm and redressing past harm.

Which leads to our next recommendation: Strengthen and adapt legal and regulatory frameworks. In many of our cases, we saw situations in which industries or companies privatized financial benefits while they externalized and socialized the risks, which instead are borne largely by the public.

There are several ways that national governments can shift financial burdens from publics to investors and developers. Implementing "polluters pay" frameworks would ensure that energy companies bear the cost of environmental cleanup. At the same time, we need to reevaluate and revise a lot of the existing legislation to shift the risks of failures, such as severe accidents or failed infrastructure projects, to the nuclear industry and away from communities and taxpayers.

And another piece of this is avoiding the regulatory capture that we saw, for example, in the Boeing case that Nicholas described. National governments have to protect their regulatory agencies from industry influence. They can do this by enacting policies prohibiting a revolving door between regulatory roles and roles advocating for nuclear energy, which could include requiring waiting periods before changing positions, implementing systems to track employment history and relationships, and increasing funding, so that governmental regulators are less dependent on industry experts.

This next recommendation addresses some of the environmental and energy injustices that Txai described above: Equitably distribute benefits. The two big ones are likely to be energy resources and income. Impacted communities should receive both discounted or free energy and a share of the profits. Learning from the case of the Moses-Saunders Dam, neighbors should also receive priority access to any generated energy, rather than any co-sited industries that often strike deals for discounted rates and uninterrupted service. At the same time, we want to see worker training programs to ensure that local people benefit economically from nearby nuclear sites, even before any profit-sharing might kick in. That will require investment in well-tailored job training programs that consider both the realistic needs of the new reactor and any co-sited industries, as well as existing skills and experience in the community.

And finally, identify, repair, and remediate harms. We cannot look forward to the future of nuclear without a clear-eyed reckoning with its past. It's not only that repairing past damage is the right and just thing to do, it's also necessary if you want a skeptical public to embrace advanced nuclear. They have to see that the industry has learned from and fixed its mistakes, and won't make them again. It's not enough simply to identify and acknowledge past damage. We need to make real investment in repairing those harms for affected communities and enacting legal protections against future harms.

That is a very quick overview of our recommendations. I hope you'll dig into them in more depth in the report, and now I'm going to hand things back to Shobita for the Q&A.

[00:51:42]

Shobita Parthasarathy:

Thank you, Molly. So now we're, of course, moving into the Q&A, and I'm going to ask all of our panelists to turn their videos on. We've got some great questions already, and I know others, and hopefully we'll have some time to answer at least a handful of them, but keep the questions coming.

So maybe I'll start with the first question that came in the chat, which is, how you might reflect on the approach and the findings of this report, to inform a research approach to energy systems that incorporates our findings and better serves the interests of people and the planet. Denia, you want to start us off?

[00:52:27]

Denia Djokić:

Thanks, Shobita. I'll take this one, and I love this question. So our report only focused on one energy technology, right? But ideally, we would like to not just focus on one energy technology in future research. So if we're answering this question focusing only on energy, I would say what we can learn from this report is—to study energy systems more broadly before they get deployed, many research approaches, when they engage with the ethics around a technology, they often see them as totally removed from and only applied after the development of a technology or a system, or the deployment of a system. So I think when we're thinking about deploying energy systems, we could look at all the potential technologies in an energy system, and basically replicate this study, but on a much larger scale. And, really try and intervene with governance frameworks before we deploy these at a large scale. And I will add, that another really important component to research agendas is to not frame the deployment of technologies in general—but in this case, specifically energy technologies—to not frame the social as a "barrier". The public is not a barrier; it is a key component to building these energy systems. And in our case, we got really lucky that our funders recognized the value of designing these technologies and governance before they have the potential to enact harm. And I would highly encourage other funders out there to emulate that and do the same and recognize those research approaches.

[00:54:27]

Shobita Parthasarathy:

Thank you so much, Denia. And now I want to, switch to the question about the interdisciplinarity of our team, or multidisciplinarity of our team. And particularly, I want to highlight, I mean, Denia, of course, you, but I would love to hear from Nicholas or Txai, or Michael in particular, coming from the science and engineering side. You know, what was your experience of doing this kind of STS-based work for this project, and you know, what was challenging, but also what did you find useful or beneficial?

[00:55:04]

Txai Sibley:

I'll be happy to start it off. So I just finished my PhD in material science engineering, and for me, coming to this work was just an enormous relief. I feel like a lot of times the ethical dimensions of technology are under-discussed, if discussed at all, in the technological spaces and in STEM. So, for me, I always was curious about, and felt a real responsibility to investigate what the potential societal ramifications of technological development were, and I didn't feel like I really had the space to do that in STEM. So it's been enormously rewarding to be able to pursue this type of work, and also really empowering because I feel that I can take certain frameworks back into engineering with me, and I have more ways of communicating the importance of this type of work, and also kind of broadening the idea of what it really means for a technology to be truly functional. So, it's been great.

[00:56:04]

Nicholas Stubblefield:

That's good. And I think where Txai experienced relief, I experienced revelation. As someone who had come in from a highly technical background, almost, like, putting a lot of belief in this idea of the exceptionalism of science, of scientists and engineers. And being exposed to a lot more of these ethical, and moral components and dynamics to these technologies that we should be thinking about. Honestly, it was fairly revolutionary to think in these new ways. I also credit—I was within the STPP grad program that kind of put me in this pipeline to participate in this project as helping me think about these dimensions of projects when we deploy them. And so I think I'm coming away with it with a lot of gratitude for the impact that it has made on the way that I think about technology and the world.

[00:57:00]

Michael Redmond:

I just want to, you know, plus one to everything that's been said, absolutely, and a lot of credit to the STPP program for helping to, you know, bring folks from science and engineering to think about the implications of technologies and these systems more broadly. I'll also say that I think, you know, as someone with an environmental science and climate science background, you know, we're encouraged to think about systems, and systems thinking is very stressed, and I think that bringing that mentality and those skills into thinking about policy and the implications of technology and the way that societies and communities engage with new forms of technology was really helpful, and I think should absolutely be encouraged going forward, and I'm just grateful to be able to participate in this project.

[00:57:48]

Shobita Parthasarathy:

Great, we have one minute left, and I feel like I can't help but ask the question, the sort of million-dollar question, about U of M and its growth in not just computing facilities, but also the investment in data centers, and I'm wondering, what might you tell the administration about that initiative and the potential use of deploying SMRs for that purpose?

[00:58:21]

Molly Kleinman:

I can take this one. This feels very sticky and thorny for all of us. But, you know, one of the big lessons that we came away with from this project was about the importance of true collaboration and engagement with the public from the very beginning of work like this. And I think what we're seeing right now with, the U of M project in particular is a real resistance to doing that kind of engagement. And I think that that is where a lot of the tension is arising from, that we have publics that feel like they have not been heard, their concerns are being dismissed and no clear ways to engage productively. And so, I think that to me is the big lesson that I would ask folks in leadership on that particular topic to take away.

[00:59:12]

Shobita Parthasarathy:

Wonderful. Well, thank you for that. We are out of time, unfortunately, but I do want to point, folks, especially those who ask questions, to our report, and the link is in the chat, because a number of the questions that you asked, are addressed in the report, and I also encourage you to reach out to us as the report's authors. And we would also hope that we can continue to engage in this really important discussion. Have a wonderful day, and we will see you at the next STPP event. Take care.