Aspirational Ontologies: Longstorming the U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Revival

Abstract

The second Trump administration is reviving spent nuclear fuel reprocessing under the banner of a “circular nuclear economy." The policy shift prefigures nuclear waste as a “resource,” “fuel,” “asset,” and “feedstock” years or decades in advance of constructing the domestic industrial systems required to realize these identities. No national reprocessing program—in the United States, France, Japan, Britain, or Russia—has fully closed the nuclear fuel cycle, and all have generated post-reprocessing waste streams that require geological disposal. Why, then, is reprocessing’s historically unfulfilled promise returning with such Promethean confidence? This talk develops the concept of aspirational ontology: a sociomaterial status enacted in the present whose accomplishment depends on economic, industrial, and political conditions anticipated, but not guaranteed, to exist in the future. Examining executive orders, draft legislation, regulatory initiatives, federal solicitations, congressional hearings, and agency reports from 2024 to 2026, it asks what kind of object spent fuel becomes when institutions performatively redescribe its environmental liabilities as prospective national energy assets. Of interest is how the US reprocessing revival reorients policy knowledge to enable a more flattering national story: a country that has struggled for decades to dispose of spent fuel is reinvented as one innovative enough to turn nuclear trash into treasure. It also fosters a politics of premature celebration, in which a nuclear-industrial renaissance is heralded long before its material realization. By “longstorming” (Ialenti 2027) across historical contexts, promissory futures, and radioactive afterlives, the talk examines why these ontological statuses make fragile foundations for long-term governance: they depend on shifting policy knowledge and prospective nuclear-industrial relations whose ultimate realization remains uncertain. Presenter: Vincent Ialenti is a cultural anthropologist, former senior program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy, and senior research fellow at Tampere University in Finland. He is the author of two MIT Press books: Deep Time Reckoning (2020), an ethnographic study of experts envisioning the distant future of Finland's Onkalo nuclear waste repository, and Longstorming: Beyond the Age of Haste (2027), which explores practices of temporal imagination across art, science, technology, and ecology. At the U.S. Department of Energy, he managed a $24 million consent-based siting initiative supporting community engagement and capacity building around nuclear waste management. Previously, he was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs and held research fellowships at the University of Southern California and the University of British Columbia. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and his essays and op-eds have appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American, NPR, Forbes, BBC, and The Hill.