CISAC Faculty Member and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry tells the story of how he became a nuclear weapons abolitionist. He recounts six personal experiences that led him to turn away from his lifelong career of developing and managing nuclear weapons, and pursue the goal of eliminating them.
Despite hundreds of aboveground nuclear tests, the effects of a ground-level, low-yield nuclear detonation in a modern urban environment remain the subject of scientific debate. In support of the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Office of Health Affairs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has provided detailed consequence modeling in support community preparedness activities. Details on effects specific to several cities was provided to that community's emergency response personal and managers. Block by block detailed analysis of observable effects, potential casualties, infrastructure effects, and response issues. Additionally, visualization aids for response organizations trying to understand the event was requested and developed at the community's request. These products provide first person points of view and described the dynamic nature of the event as it changes in both time and space and have greatly enhanced Federal, State, and local planning efforts.
Brooke Buddemeier is an associate program leader in the Global Security Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He supports the Risk and Consequence Management Division in their efforts to evaluate the potential risk and consequence of radiological and nuclear terrorism. Brooke is a council member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) and served on the scientific committees which developed Commentary No. 19 - Key Elements of Preparing Emergency Responders for Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism (2005) and NCRP Report # 165 – Responding to a Radiological or Nuclear Terrorism Incident: A Guide for Decision Makers (2010).
From 2003 through 2007, Brooke was on assignment with the Department of Homeland Security’s as the WMD emergency response and consequence management program manager for Science and Technology’s emergency preparedness and response portfolio. He supported FEMA and the Homeland Security Operations Center as a radiological emergency response subject matter expert. He also facilitated the department’s research, development, test, and evaluation process to improve emergency response through better capabilities, protocols, and standards. Prior to that, he was part of LLNL’s Nuclear Counterterrorism Program and coordinated LLNL’s involvement in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Radiological Assistance Program for California, Nevada, and Hawaii. RAP is a national emergency response resource that assists federal, state and local authorities in the event of a radiological incident. As part of RAP’s outreach efforts, Brooke has provided radiological responder training and instrumentation workshops to police, firefighters, and members of other agencies throughout the nation and abroad. Brooke has also provided operational health physics support for various radiochemistry, plutonium handling, accelerator, and dosimetry operations.
He is Certified Health Physicist who received his Master’s in Radiological Health Physics from San Jose State University and his B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
CISAC Conference Room
South Korea’s impressive nuclear power industry has quickly reached world class status on par with leaders like France, Japan and the United States. With this success has brought a familiar array of problems associated with spent nuclear fuel disposition. I present a model of spent fuel production and transportation in South Korea as well as a range of potential options to delay saturation of spent fuel storage pools in the short term. I will also discuss implications for arguments surrounding pyroprocessing as a long term solution to the fuel cycle, especially in the context of the upcoming renewal of the 123 nuclear sharing agreement with the United States.
Rob Forrest is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on the role of particle accelerators in the future nuclear fuel cycle, specifically on the feasibility of Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) in sub-critical reactor designs and the transmutation of nuclear waste. Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.
Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he preformed a search for signs of a hypothetical theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory working with the Klystrons that supply the RF power to the accelerator. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for the NASA EarthKam project.
CISAC Conference Room
The Stanton Foundation has made a $5 million gift to the Center for International Security and Cooperation to establish the Frank Stanton Professorship in Nuclear Security and reinforce CISAC’s longstanding mission to build a safer world.
The endowed chair will allow Stanford to appoint an internationally recognized scholar to conduct research in nuclear security and energy, and related issues relevant to international arms control policy. The professor also will teach a course at CISAC related to nuclear security issues, enhancing CISAC’s mandate to advance interdisciplinary research on international security and cooperation, and to train the next generation of security specialists.
“How societies throughout the world handle nuclear security challenges will have a profound impact on our future,” said Tino Cuéllar, CISAC’s co-director and next director of its umbrella organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “The Stanton chair will help CISAC, the Freeman Spogli Institute and Stanford continue a tradition going back three decades of being at the forefront in global efforts to understand nuclear energy and its enormous consequences for civilization.”
Former CBS president Frank Stanton established the foundation, which also funds CISAC’s Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowships for pre- and post-doctoral students and junior faculty who are studying policy-relevant issues related to nuclear security.
Stanton became actively engaged in international security issues in 1954 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to a committee to develop the first comprehensive plan for the nation’s survival following a nuclear attack. He was responsible for developing plans for international communications in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
"The Stanton Foundation has played a huge role, through its generous fellowship funding, to enable CISAC and other leading research institutions help train the next generation of nuclear security specialists,” said Scott Sagan, a political science professor and senior fellow at CISAC and FSI.
Sagan, co-author of “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate,” and a scholar of nuclear nonproliferation and weapons of mass destruction, has been closely tied to the foundation since he served as CISAC co-director from 1998-2011 and helped to usher in the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship program.
“This gift from Stanton will ensure that CISAC's important role in policy-relevant research on nuclear issues will continue in perpetuity,” Sagan said.
Scott Sagan, in this piece for Foreign Policy, remembers his longtime friend and colleague Kenneth Waltz. Waltz passed away on May 13. Sagan praised his work, noting that the realist perspective on the stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons struck a chord with international experts and strategists, even though his views were not popular in the United States. Waltz's contributions to the debate about nuclear weapons have left an enguring legacy.
Symposium description:
A unique, two-day symposium at which an international panel of leading medical and biological scientists, nuclear engineers, and policy experts will make presentations on and discuss the bio-medical and ecological consequences of the Fukushima disaster, will be held at The New York Academy of Medicine on March 11-12, 2013, the second anniversary of the accident.
A project of The Helen Caldicott Foundation, the symposium is being co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
View the video online at The Helen Caldicott Foundation.
Rod Ewing, a mineralogist and materials scientist who is an expert on nuclear waste management and policy, will join Stanford University to focus on sustainable energy, security and environmental research at the intersection of physical science and public policy.
Ewing has been named to a joint appointment as Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also becomes the inaugural Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security Studies, an endowed chair established with a $5 million gift from the Stanton Foundation.
Ewing was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2012 to serve as the chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for the technical review of Department of Energy activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
Ewing, who earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium, is currently the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan.
He will take up his new position at Stanford next January and will help bridge Earth Sciences and CISAC to encourage collaboration on scientific and public policy projects.
“What is important to me is to be able to see the connections between subjects that, at first glance, do not appear to be connected,” said Ewing, a former visiting professor at CISAC. His research will continue to focus on the response of materials to extreme environments and the increasing demand for strategic minerals for use in the development of sustainable energy technologies.
Ewing, who has been at the University of Michigan for 16 years, will take advantage of Stanford’s state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, such as the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, for his work on the response of materials to extreme environments.
Ewing said in the past five years there has been growing interest in the performance of materials under extreme conditions, such as inside a nuclear reactor.
“There is a practical interest because new types of materials may form under extreme conditions that have never been previously synthesized,” he said. “And in some cases, these new materials may have very useful properties.”
He expects to teach courses in nuclear security, mineralogy, and energy issues.
| Image
|
Pamela A. Matson, the Chester Naramore Dean of Earth Sciences at Stanford, said Ewing would help the school define a program in strategic minerals.
“This is an area of renewed interest to us, particularly in light of the need for these resources in renewable energy technologies,” Matson said. “To address the sustainability challenges of the 21st century, we need to both innovate in science and technology areas, and also understand the social and political environments in which decisions are made – and Rod does both. We believe he will help us build a strong partnership between the School of Earth Sciences and CISAC, thus strengthening Stanford’s efforts to solve critical environment and energy problems.”
Ewing spent a year on sabbatical at CISAC during the 2010-2011 academic year. “The quality and diversity of topics really swept me away; everything from terrorism, to nuclear issues to the ethics of war,” he said of his year in Encina Hall.
“Rod Ewing will serve as a vital bridge between science and policy,” said Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Co-Director of CISAC. “His research addresses fundamental questions about nuclear energy with enormous importance to global security.”
Ewing’s interest in nuclear science was sparked in childhood, when he saved up his allowance to buy the Disney book, “Our Friend the Atom.”
“Looking back at the book, one might call it propaganda, but it certainly captured my imagination,” said Ewing, who would go on to author or co-author more than 600 research publications and become the founding editor of the magazine, “Elements.”
As a graduate student on a National Science Foundation grant, he worked on a neglected field of metamict minerals, a relatively rare group of minerals damaged by radiation emitted by uranium and thorium atoms. The study of these unusual minerals in the last 30 years has blossomed into a broadly based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal.
Ewing will continue to chair the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board as the DOE continues its efforts to find, characterize and license a geological repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste.
“The first issue at hand in the United States is to develop a process for selecting a repository site,” said Ewing. “The challenge will be to combine scientific and technical criteria with the consent of local communities, tribal nations and states.”
Analysts at CISAC, together with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, are playing a leading role in deriving new and timely information of global security relevance from a variety of open-source geospatial tools. These include digital virtual globes like Google Earth together with satellite imagery available from commercial vendors via cloud computing. This article describes some discoveries, by CISAC researchers and others, which have recently become possible through the use of such tools.
Abstract:
Analysts at CISAC, together with colleagues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, are playing a leading role in deriving new, timely, and value-added information of global security and earth science relevance from a variety of open-source geospatial tools that include digital virtual globes like Google Earth together with satellite imagery available from commercial vendors via the internet Cloud. This article provides some discovery exemplars, by CISAC researchers and others, which have only quite recently become possible through the use of such tools.
