# Vincent Ialenti

Vincent Ialenti is an American anthropologist who studies the culture of nuclear energy and weapons waste organizations. He is the author of Deep Time Reckoning, an anthropological exploration of how experts assessed the potential impact of Finland's Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository on future ecosystems and civilizations.
Ialenti works in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, where he leads DOE's Consent-Based Siting Consortia: twelve project teams - drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector - awarded $24m to facilitate public understanding of spent nuclear fuel management. Ialenti is also a research associate at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt's Department of Environmental Studies.
Ialenti has been on faculty at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs and has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, the University of British Columbia, The Berggruen Institute, and Cornell University's Society for the Humanities.

## Biography

Ialenti holds a MSc in "Law, Anthropology, and Society" from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University. At Cornell, Ialenti taught an interdisciplinary writing seminar called Nuclear Imagination: Technology and Worlds.
In 2017, Ialenti became the first anthropologist with a feature article in Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics. Later that year, Helsingin Sanomat published a front-page human interest story about his anthropological search for insights left behind by an enigmatic nuclear waste expert he called Seppo.
In 2018, Ialenti was a Nuclear Security Innovation Network Fellow in the N Square Collaborative, a nuclear threat awareness collective funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Ploughshares Fund.
From 2017 to 2019, Ialenti conducted a field study exploring the political, economic, and organizational drivers behind transuranic nuclear weapons waste "drum breach" accidents at Idaho National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. He developed this study in collaboration with geologist Allison Macfarlane, the former Chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
MIT Press and Penguin Random House published Ialenti's first book, Deep Time Reckoning, in 2020. The book examined Finnish nuclear waste company Posiva's initiative to model far future societies, bodies, and ecosystems—and how their efforts were enabled by the Finnish populace's high levels of trust in geotechnical engineers, regulators, and ministry experts.
In 2021, Ialenti became the first anthropologist with an article published in the American Nuclear Society's technical journal Nuclear Technology. Later that year, Ialenti was featured alongside ambient musician Brian Eno in a Headspace meditation podcast about long-term thinking.
Ialenti currently hosts a U.S. Department of Energy webinar series on participatory governance, community engagement, and sociopolitical innovations for solving America's nuclear waste stalemate.

## Personal life

Ialenti is married to conservationist Allegra Wrocklage.
Ialenti is an Associate of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, California.

## Books

* Ialenti, Vincent (2020). Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262539265.