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.

Introduction and Contribution:

Addressing the climate crisis will require concerted action from political parties. Western countries arguably bear a greater responsibility to act given their greater levels of wealth. Some of this wealth has been accumulated at the expense of the countries most affected by climate change. Yet Western political parties vary widely in terms of their positions on environmental protection, particularly across Europe. Some parties conceive of climate action as a moral imperative, as a costly endeavor in which the government should not be involved, or even as a conspiracy to undermine national sovereignty.

Environmental party platforms would intuitively seem to align with familiar political “cleavages” — parties that support economic redistribution tend to favor climate action, while those resistant to social change tend to oppose it. But Europe is a continent with distinct regional and historical legacies. Indeed, some countries left the Communist bloc less than 35 years ago. All of this complicates simple inferences about party platforms and requires more thorough efforts to validate our intuitions. 

In “How green is my party?,” Anna Grzymala-Busse, Piotr Jabkowski, and Mariusz Baranowski assess the determinants of environmental platforms across 280 European parties in 38 countries. The authors find a significant relationship between support for climate action and three cleavages: the economy, cultural values, and populism. As one might expect, parties with right-wing economic positions and conservative cultural positions are less likely to support environmental protection. More surprisingly, both right- and left-wing populist parties are less likely to support climate action. However, these general associations vary considerably across regions, especially in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

The authors show that regional differences, especially between CEE and Northwestern or Southern Europe, persist and map onto climate politics. At the same time, and as populist parties in CEE such as Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) gain power and promote climate skepticism, the reader gains a sense of why these parties depart from traditional understandings of European politics and ideology.

More generally, populist parties and movements have garnered huge followings in places as diverse as India, the United States, and Brazil. “How green is my party?” deepens our understanding of why these movements can be so unwilling to budge on addressing climate change. 

Data and Findings:

The authors use data from a 2019 questionnaire of nearly 1900 European party and election experts. The three cleavages mentioned above are measured on an 11-point scale, with higher values indicating more right-wing, conservative, and populist platforms. Countries are grouped into three regions: Northwest, South, and CEE. The South Caucasus and the closed autocracies of Russia and Belarus are excluded.
 

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Figure 1. European democratic countries covered by the Global Party Survey, 2019.
 

Two of the most interesting contributions in “How green is my party?” are to show that (a) populism is significant in shaping opposition to climate action and (b) CEE remains a distinctive region in respect of its climate politics. Why might this be the case? 

Regarding populism, one would expect left-wing populists — who denounce a wealthy elite as standing against “the people” — to support climate action. Indeed, this elite can be easily constructed as destroying the environment in order to accumulate wealth. However, the authors note that left populists tend to deemphasize environmental issues or reframe them as purely economic. For example, such parties have been skeptical of policies such as tax breaks for electric vehicle production, on the grounds that they primarily benefit wealthy corporations. 

More generally, populists tend to view appeals to scientific consensus with skepticism, as “technocratic” schemes to undermine the people. This likely explains why the authors find a strong association between populism and opposition to environmental action across all three European regions (Southern, Northwest, and CEE). Interestingly, right populists are not found to be particularly likely to oppose environmental protection. Left and right populists are also more likely to oppose climate action than social conservatives.
 

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Figure 3. Moderating effect of populism on the impact of party position on social conservatism-liberalism on the position on the environmental protection scale.
 

CEE is distinctive in part because right-wing populist parties have thrived there. Many of these parties view climate action as a foreign, leftist conspiracy. This has fueled skepticism and opposition to green agendas. Meanwhile, CEE’s reliance on fossil fuels has led parties to view climate action as a threat to economic growth — and thus as political suicide. For these reasons and because CEE states are relatively new, the region also lacks strong environmental civil society organizations or green parties. On the 11-point scale, median opposition to environmental action in CEE is about one point higher than in Southern Europe and nearly three points higher than in Northwestern Europe.
 

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Figure 2. Parties’ positions on environmental issues by region of Europe.
 

A third notable finding is that the intuitive link between economic and cultural values is weaker in CEE. In other words, opposition to environmental protection is only associated with the economic right in South and Northwest Europe. This is because populist parties in CEE tend to support both economic redistribution and conservative cultural values. Redistribution is framed as a means of protecting people from perceived threats to their way of life, such as immigration or social liberalism. By contrast, CEE social liberals tend to support the free market, a position owing to their negative experiences with communist central planning.

“How green is my party?” both accounts for the high degree of variation across European party platforms and identifies patterns and regional clusters to help readers sift through climate politics across the continent. It remains to be seen whether supranational institutions such as the EU can offset weak climate action by some European ruling parties.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Introduction & Contribution:

The social and economic costs of climate change are significant, including damage to infrastructure, loss of agriculture, and disruptions to education. Hurricanes and storms, such as Hurricane Katrina or Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis, are particularly visible and destructive manifestations of climate change. The incidence of these storms varies across places, suggesting that migration from more- to less-exposed areas could be an important form of climate adaptation, alongside, e.g., building more resilient infrastructure. However, our knowledge of climate migration, particularly its causes and frequency, is limited.

In “Understanding the migratory responses to hurricanes and tropical storms in the USA,” A. Patrick Behrer and Valentin Bolotnyy show — perhaps contrary to expectations — that Americans’ migratory response to storms is limited. Most storms do not result in meaningful out-migration from impacted counties. Meanwhile, when people do migrate, they do not necessarily move to areas with less storm exposure. The paper draws on a range of data sources to highlight the deeply economic drivers of migration, which stem from the concentration of economic opportunity in storm-exposed areas.

The paper highlights tensions between two commonplace assumptions: first, that “rational” migration should reduce the risks of climate change, and second, that migration is driven by economic opportunity. These assumptions are in tension precisely because, as Behrer and Bolotnyy show, hurricane risk and economic opportunity are highly correlated in America. One policy implication is that local governments must invest in storm-resilient infrastructure to prevent the destruction of physical capital and the flight of human capital. In addition, permitting more remote work could reduce the economic appeal of productive but vulnerable migration hubs.

Prior Research:

Scholars have found evidence that hurricanes and storms both do and do not affect migration, which tends to vary based on the places studied and their levels of economic development. These contradictory findings would seem to call for a deeper investigation of the causal mechanisms underlying climate migration, but our understanding is also limited here. Do individuals and families migrate as a consequence of long-term factors (e.g., frequent, medium-intensity flooding) or short-term ones (e.g., a single severe flood)? Do they migrate on the basis of rational, cost-minimizing calculations, or are they influenced by cognitive biases that lead them to overestimate the true costs of one disaster? And what role do certain amenities (e.g., reliable infrastructure) or forms of protective insurance play in decreasing the incentives to migrate?

It is difficult to sustain a purely instrumental account of migration, which is largely driven by existing social networks and occurs over short distances. For example, many survivors of Hurricane Katrina moved to Houston, which is a similarly exposed city just over 300 miles away. Even long-distance migration tends to be driven by social networks and may offer little protection against storms. Finally, migration is costly, not only in terms of moving but because housing prices in less-exposed areas are often bid up for that very reason.

Data, Methods, and Results:

Behrer and Bolotnyy’s empirical analysis is guided by several questions. First, do we observe greater outmigration after storms? Second, do migrants move to less at-risk counties? And finally, has the overall population of high-risk areas declined over the last 25 years? To answer these questions, the authors utilize migration data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as well as storm exposure data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Hurricane Center, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Their regression models estimate the extent of migratory change in storm years relative to non-storm years, including lagged models that estimate changes in the years following storms.
 

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Fig. 1C-F: c,d, Coefficients from a panel fixed-effects regression of outmigration (c) and net migration (d) on whether a county experienced a storm. The first bar plots the coefficient from a regression with only contemporaneous storms. The next six bars show coefficients from a separate regression that includes contemporaneous storms and five year lags (L1–L5). The final bar shows the sum of the coefficients from the lags regression. The light grey lines show the 95% CIs. The sample size for these regressions was 52,514 for the outmigration results and 52,448 for the net migration results. e, Migrant-receiving counties in our sample period and the average number of migrants received in non-storm years. f, The same as e but in storm years.
 

Their results indicate that American outmigration has not increased at statistically significant levels after storms. In addition, there is no evidence that migrants in storm years move to less exposed areas compared to migrants in non-storm years. The most damaging storms are indeed followed by increased outmigration, but there is no evidence that migrants move to low-risk areas. In fact, they often migrate to other high-risk areas and to places with high economic activity. This is because the majority of American GDP is generated in coastal areas where storms are more prevalent. The authors thus uncover a tradeoff, namely that places in the U.S. with more opportunity face more risk. GDP is substantially more predictive of migration than storm risk. The economic and social benefits of moving to high-risk areas appear to outweigh any incentives to reduce one’s storm exposure via relocation. Finally, the authors find that overall population exposure to storms has increased.
 

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Fig. 4: GDP versus net migration and number of storms. a, Correlation between net migration and GDP. The Z-score of total net migration is the Z-score across all counties of the sum of net migration (in-migration minus outmigration) for each county across all years in the sample. The Z-score of GDP is based on county GDP in 2019, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. All points are shaded equally, with darker areas on the graph indicating a greater density of counties. We omitted three outliers with GDP Z-scores >10. We show a version of this figure that includes the outliers in Supplementary Fig. 3. b, Correlation between the number of storms and GDP. Total storms is the sum of storms hitting each county across all years in our sample. ln(2019 GDP) is the natural log of county GDP in 2019, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. All points are shaded equally, with darker areas on the graph indicating a greater density of counties. The x-axis units are log points.
 

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Fig. 3: Trend in population-weighted exposure and correlation between net migration and total storms. a, Trend in population-weighted exposure. We plotted the weighted average number of storms across all 2,387 counties in our sample. Weights are the county population in each year. The number of storms in each county is the sum over the sample and so remains constant across years. The change in the trend line is due to changes in where people live. The flat grey lines show the weighted average if populations had not changed from 1990 levels—that is, if no one had moved. The solid lines show all storms. The dashed lines show storms with at least US$10 million in damages according to FEMA. b, Correlation between net migration and total storms. The Z-score of total net migration is the Z-score across all counties of the sum of net migration (in-migration minus outmigration) in the county across all years in the sample. The Z-score of total storms is the Z-score across all counties of all storms over our sample period. All points are shaded equally; darker areas on the graph indicate a greater density of counties. The dashed line is the linear best fit line of the plotted data points.
 

The authors caution that these findings may be driven by (a) those Americans most impacted by storms being least able to move, this despite their preferences to do so, and (b) those with the means to insure themselves against climate risks having weaker preferences to move. In addition, migration within the same county — for example, moving from lower to higher sea level areas — may be a significant but hidden process that enables climate adaptation. The findings may also be less relevant to understanding migration dynamics in low- and middle-income countries, especially in places with less comprehensive insurance and less resilient infrastructure.

Behrer and Bolotnyy deepen our understanding of the importance and “stickiness” of geography. Indeed, many people do not or cannot move, even if they want to and even if staying in place puts them at risk. One wonders about how these processes interact with politics. For example, climate change has coincided with the powerful forces of climate change denial. Perhaps skepticism about storms as systemic phenomena is blunting migratory pressures, leading those affected to view them as one-off occurrences. Similarly, social scientists have coined the term “petro-masculinity” to describe an identity that views the climate change consensus as an attack on, e.g., driving large trucks or eating meat. It may be that when this identity is salient, people view climate migration as a form of weakness or betrayal.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.