Nothing “goes away”; it is simply transferred from place to place, converted from one molecular form to another, acting on the life processes of any organism in which it becomes, for a time, lodged.

Barry Commoner, in The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology, 1971

Our Radioactive Neighbors

Collaborative Imagination, Community Futures, and Nuclear Siting Practices

Edited by Clark A. Miller, Ruth Wylie, and Joey Eschrich

Our Radioactive Neighbors. Copyright © 2025 Arizona State University.

ISBN 978-1-7367758-9-9

Fiction
The copyrights for individual short stories are owned by their respective authors, as follows:
“Return to Sender” © 2025 Sarena Ulibarri
“City of Hillsville” © 2025 Justina Ireland
“Generating Hope” © 2025 Carter Meland
“Pursuant to the Agreement” © 2025 Andrew Dana Hudson

Art
The copyrights for all visual art pieces are owned by Dwayne Manuel © 2025.

Nonfiction
“Living with the Future” © 2025 Clark A. Miller, Ruth Wylie, and Joey Eschrich
“Energy Systems and the Production of Nuclear Waste” © 2025 Ian H. Rowlands
“Can We Live with Nuclear Neighbors?” © 2025 Krzysztof Janas
“Waste No More” © 2025 Alycia de Mesa
“The History of Nuclear Waste Policy and Consent-Based Siting” © 2025 Jennifer Richter
“Successful and Unsuccessful Siting of Nuclear Waste Facilities” © 2025 Allison M. Macfarlane
“Experiences with Nuclear Siting in Nevada and New Mexico” © 2025 Nicole Cox and Jennifer Richter
“A Guide to Community Participation in Nuclear Siting Processes” © 2025 Nafeesa Irshad and Clark A. Miller
“The Discount Rate: A Number to Know” © 2025 Christopher F. Jones
“Environmental Injustice in Nuclear Waste Siting Processes” © 2025 Myrriah Gómez

Section break icons designed by Rumana Islam, distributed by The Noun Project. Learn more and download the icon at https://thenounproject.com/icon/atom-7988913.

For information about funding, see the Acknowledgment of U.S. Department of Energy Funding below.

Center for Science and the Imagination
Arizona State University
PO Box 876511
Tempe, AZ 85287-6511

csi.asu.edu
imagination@asu.edu

About this Project

This book is about imagining what it would be like for a community to live next door to a future facility for storing nuclear waste. The book’s goal is to inform community discussions about whether or not to take on the responsibility of hosting such a facility and, if they do end up with one nearby, how a community might live well with their nuclear neighbors over the facility’s lifetime.

To be sure, people around the United States live with nuclear waste every day. The Prairie Island Indian Community, for example, share their island in the Mississippi River with a nuclear power plant. The Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant was built in 1973, without the tribe’s knowledge or consent, and produces electricity for the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Because the U.S. doesn’t have a permanent site to store waste from nuclear power generation, a half-century of radioactive spent nuclear fuel from the plant now sits in an array of sealed concrete-and-metal casks in a neighboring field, a few hundred feet from homes of community members. Nuclear waste similarly sits at seventy-nine other sites across the U.S. with either currently operating or decommissioned nuclear reactors, to the consternation of many locals who have long been assured that the U.S. would build a permanent repository to take the waste out of their communities and store it safely underground. This issue is only becoming more pronounced. Waste continues to pile up at existing reactors. The U.S. has recently restarted construction of new nuclear plants after decades of dormancy. And considerations are growing in the electricity and technology sectors of building an extensive new fleet of small modular reactors that would generate even more spent nuclear fuel in need of a safe, permanent home.

Our Radioactive Neighbors is part of a larger project and program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to explore whether an alternative is possible to just leaving the nation’s nuclear waste where it is. In this alternative, the U.S. would eventually move the spent nuclear fuel from the nation’s nuclear power plants to a central waste repository, either permanently or on an interim basis (perhaps for fifty to one hundred years). In fact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed two sites for potential interim storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico, and the validity of those licenses was upheld by the Supreme Court in June of 2025. While a number of hurdles likely remain, including continued opposition from both states, the U.S. may be moving closer to building a capacity to store nuclear waste in interim facilities.

This possibility raises two unanswered questions: how to secure community support for building a future nuclear waste repository, and how to ensure that the community and the waste facility remain good neighbors for the duration. In 2012, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, convened by President Barack Obama, recommended that the siting of a future repository be carried out through an up-front process of informed agreement, called consent-based siting, effectively asking permission of the host community to build the facility in their backyard.

It’s an ambitious idea. There is no guarantee, of course, that the U.S. government will use such an approach to site a future nuclear waste repository. And the sites in Texas and New Mexico did not, at least formally. Some have argued that trying to secure community agreement in advance simply creates further delays in the siting process. They believe the U.S. should just make a decision and get on with building a facility. And for advocates of community-centered approaches, it’s probably not a good sign that the Department of Energy changed the name of the program in early 2025 from consent-based siting to collaboration-based siting. But it’s still an idea worth exploring, even if the federal government backs away from it. Other countries have successfully sited nuclear waste storage facilities using consent-based processes, often after decades of failing via traditional methods (as described in the chapter by Allison Macfarlane). And it’s an approach that’s much more consistent with the nation’s democratic principles than attempting to use other reasoning, such as national security, to justify ignoring or overruling community voices and decisions.

Communities involved in processes for siting nuclear waste storage facilities should have access to robust, collaborative visions of the future, not just technical and logistical details about the facility and its impact. Such decisions have the potential to shape the community’s future for decades and even centuries to come. How, then, could a community make an informed choice without some sort of collective reflection on what a future spent living and working as neighbors with nuclear waste might bring? How might it change community life? How might the facility and its workforce become part of the community, or remain separate, and what would that mean for how the community sees itself and its role in the world? What might it do for economic prosperity, or for the kinds of businesses and activities which see the community as a place to be or not to be in the future? Crucially, these visions of the future should not be limited to false utopian promises of boundless shared prosperity or dystopian visions of nuclear cataclysm. They should trace viable pathways forward for the community to define and reach its own goals, and shape its own future according to shared values.

These are questions that science can’t really answer, but which a community can address collaboratively with imagination. The question is how to help the community build their imaginative capacity and spark collective imagination. In this book, we attempt to do that with speculative fiction stories, visual art, and nonfiction essays on a number of relevant themes. We hope that these resources are helpful not in predicting what would happen, but in opening up an array of imaginative possibilities about how the future might take shape, and raising awareness of what imaginative exploration might bring to the table. We also hope that they are useful in building the confidence and capabilities of communities being considered as host sites for nuclear waste facilities (whether through consent-based or other processes) that they can use their collective imagination as a powerful force for intervening in and shaping the decision process, and their subsequent relations with the facility, in ways that result in better outcomes.

This book is the product of a deliberate process of collaborative imagination, which we call a narrative hackathon. In February 2024, we gathered four professional fiction authors and an interdisciplinary group of experts on nuclear history and policy, energy systems, Indigenous knowledge and culture, and technology and society for a two-day workshop at Arizona State University’s campus in Tempe, Arizona. Narrative hackathons are intensely collaborative and immersive, structured as a series of short interactive sessions with clear goals and deliverables. Participants oscillate among small-group brainstorming, large-group presentations, cross-group feedback, and time for revisions and refinement throughout the two-day event, with the goal of outlining initial story concepts, characters, plots, and themes. We also invited several of our guest experts to provide short presentations on topics like the history of U.S. nuclear policy, notions of nuclear colonialism and environmental justice, and best practices for engaging communities in the process of siting nuclear facilities. Coming out of the convening, each contributor submitted a brief written proposal for the story or essay concept they had developed during the narrative hackathon, and that initial proposal served as the basis for a multistage process of writing, conversation, editing, and revision.

During the workshop, we divided our participants into four teams of approximately three or four members, each tasked with focusing on a theme related to nuclear waste siting and community futures:

• Land: the geographic, physical, and environmental relationships between the facility and nearby communities, and the effects the facility has on access to land and various uses of land.
  
• Work: the types of labor required by the facility, from scientific monitoring to technical oversight and tuning, to security, transportation, and facilities maintenance, to community engagement and communications, and the organization, training, and education of that labor force.
  
• Governance: the institutions that oversee and govern the facility, and how they relate to community governance, including local, state, and federal policymakers and agencies, as well as potential community outreach and mechanisms for community involvement in oversight and regulation.
  
• Compensation: what communities may receive in exchange for bearing the risks and disruption involved in housing the facility, including but not limited to direct monetary transfers, infrastructure and jobs programs, education programs, land grants, and so forth.
  

We understood these issues as hopelessly entangled with one another, but we felt that each represented an important dimension of how the siting of a nuclear storage facility could co-evolve with the life, organization, place, and character of a community selected to host it. We imagined that each group would foreground their theme in their collaborative work and produce a story with a set of accompanying essays with that theme at the center.

Throughout the workshop, however, all of the teams found themselves grappling with the interdependent relationships among the four themes. And, as almost always happens in collaborative storytelling, the stories took paths that led through the thickets of people’s lives and choices, which all too often cut across many facets of human affairs. As we moved forward with the hackathon proceedings, therefore, and into subsequent editorial conversations in the months that followed, we shifted to a more fluid structure.

Accordingly, in this book you will find stories and essays carrying a looser set of shared concerns and resonances, rather than being presented in four distinct thematic groups. You will certainly notice Land, Work, Governance, and Compensation as recurring themes throughout the book, as well as deliberations on resistance, solidarity, community resilience, and environmental justice threaded through all of the chapters and artworks.

As Indigenous participants in the workshop reminded us, everything is interconnected. All of us in the United States are part of the U.S. nuclear story, whether we live next to a nuclear waste site or not. We have voted for the local, state, and federal representatives who make nuclear policy. We have used electricity from nuclear power plants. Our lands and lives have been defended by nuclear weapons. Nuclear material supply chains, fuel cycles, and waste disposal have shaped this country’s history for almost a century. We are all responsible. Not surprisingly, this rich and deep sense of interconnectedness infuses this book.

Following the two-day convening in early 2024, we spent more than a year working with our contributors on editing and iterating their pieces of writing and art, as well as thinking through the shape and scope of this book—figuring out how it can best serve readers, particularly those who are part of communities that could be approached for future nuclear siting efforts.

We hope that this collaborative energy, care, and attention comes through in the book.

Most importantly, we hope that it catalyzes your imagination not only about the future of nuclear energy and its byproducts, but about the kinds of futures that we hope to build together, and in which we hope to reside.

Living with the Future

Clark A. Miller, Ruth Wylie, and Joey Eschrich

This book aims to help communities build better futures through collective imagination and storytelling.

For many communities, the future is increasingly uncertain. In the face of such uncertainty, it is empowering to be able to imagine different possibilities for what the future might bring, to explore what those futures might mean for the community, and to relate those futures to ideas about what the community aspires to be and to become. Stories, especially those that are collaboratively written and told, are an important tool for doing and communicating such imaginative work within the community.

This book is particularly concerned with communities facing the prospect of living in futures filled with hazardous or otherwise undesirable technologies. By now, two centuries into the industrial revolution, the sacrifice of communities to the health and environmental hazards of modern technology is well understood—and increasingly rejected as an unacceptable form of environmental, social, and economic injustice.

No more visible example exists than the nuclear industry, which has contaminated the lives and livelihoods of communities from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where U.S. atomic bombs were dropped at the end of World War II; to the uranium mines of the Navajo Nation; to the polluted landscapes of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Rocky Flats, in the aftermath of various nuclear mishaps.

This brings us to the quandary that motivates this book. Suppose, as is true, here in the United States, we must now ask one or more communities to take on centuries or millennia of future uncertainty and risk in order to more safely store thousands of tons of waste generated by nuclear power plants over the past seventy years. And, perhaps, by so doing, we increase the possibility of a new, even more ambitious future for the nuclear industry, with hundreds or thousands of new nuclear power plants.

Dare we ask any community to take on such a future? If so, how?

Many of the contributors to this volume are skeptical that such a request can be made with justice. We are certain, however, of one thing. No informed decision to become a host community for a future nuclear waste repository can be made unless the community is fully empowered to collectively imagine, explore, design, and construct the future on its own terms.

This book is designed to help communities facing the prospect of becoming a host for a nuclear waste storage facility to exercise sovereignty over their collective imagination of the future.

What will the future bring?

It’s a question that we can never really answer. And yet we are constantly imagining the possibilities.

We dream about what we want to be when we grow up. Later, we dream about the lives our children and grandchildren might live, or what life might be like if we moved to another city, or another planet. We plan for the revitalization that a new factory might bring to town, and fear how the closure of a power plant will affect our local economy and community. We pray fervently for the end of war and a return to a normal life. We imagine the end times. Throughout history, we have imagined, from The Book of Revelation (first century CE) and The City of God (fifth century CE) to The Time Machine (1895) to On Thermonuclear War (1960) and Star Trek (which debuted in 1966), what the future might bring for humanity, with the help of divine forces or science.

Living with and dreaming about the future is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It’s part of what makes humans unique among forms of life, at least so far as we know.

We dream. We hope. We plan. We strategize. We fear. We imagine what might be, or might not be, depending on the choices we make. There’s just something about our brain that’s wired for imagination.

What will the future bring?

We can’t know. The future is neither predictable nor fixed. Indeed, we live at a moment in history when the future seems especially uncertain and complex.

When we ask what the future will bring, more and more often we’re greeted by a shrug: who knows?

Technology is advancing at an unprecedented and unsettling pace. Climate change is altering patterns of nature that we had taken for granted as stable. Humanity is on edge.

And, yet, we cannot just ignore reality. Our ability to imagine the future is essential to making informed choices.

To be informed is to understand that today’s actions will have consequences tomorrow, to see that different choices might well lead to different future scenarios and outcomes, and to factor the resulting insights into the decisions we make and the actions we take.

To ignore what the future might bring, to not even ask the question, is to take a step back from reason and rationality, from our obligations and accountability to our future selves and to future generations.

Our anticipatory capacity—our ability to bring visions of the future into the present—is what imagination is all about.

It’s not about knowing the future or making accurate predictions. It’s about envisioning what might be: what is probable or plausible, what we would like to be, what ought to be. And it’s about using our imaginations to make better decisions.

This book is an invitation to use our collective power of imagination to think about what it will mean to live in the future—and to use that power to inform decision-making in the present.

So many decisions that we face today are so big and complex, so entangled in different ways of looking at things, so legally and politically fraught, so wrapped up in the workings of so many different systems and supply chains, so global in scope, so beyond us as individuals or communities, that it’s hard for any of us, even experts, to fully grasp what the future could bring.

In the face of that complexity, we need new tools that can help us deliberate and make difficult choices. We propose that one such tool is collaborative storytelling.

Anticipating and imagining the future is an individual capacity. But it’s also a collective capacity. We almost never dream alone. Our hopes and fears feed on (and go on to influence) those of our neighbors. As individuals, the future we imagine is always, at least in part, a product of stories that others have already written.

We can learn to imagine collaboratively, working together in community to construct and tell shared stories of who we want to be, where we want to go, how we might get there, and what we might encounter or stumble over along the way. Collaborative storytelling is a tool for including people in a shared exploration of—and deliberation about—what might happen in the future, near or far, and what different possible scenarios might mean for the community and its future generations.

We have written this book because the United States confronts a particularly complex and difficult task, and it wants to figure out how to approach that task in the right way.

That task is to site one or more facilities—perhaps on an interim basis (maybe for 100 years or so) or perhaps permanently—in one or more communities.

The facilities in question will collect and store the nation’s nuclear waste.

This task is complex and difficult for many reasons. First, we have a lot of nuclear waste, enough to fill a football stadium, more than ninety thousand tons. And nuclear waste is nasty stuff. It gives off nuclear radiation, which is invisible and, if you are exposed to it, can make you sick, give you cancer, or even kill you. And some of that radioactive material sticks around for a really long time: ten thousand years or more. Scientists believe that they can store it safely for that long, but nature is mercurial, and humans are unpredictable. With the two acting together, over several millennia, well, who really knows what the future could bring!

After all, the United States has only been around for a couple of hundred years. The Bible for a couple of thousand. Some parts of the Great Wall of China are about 2,600 years old. What will human society look like in ten thousand years? Will we still know what nuclear waste is, or remember that it’s there? Will we still communicate in the same language? Will we be able to understand the dangers?

So, as you can guess, a lot of communities imagine what it might be like to live with those long, unpredictable, potentially hazardous futures and say, “No, thank you.” Or, more probably, “No thank you!”

At the same time, it turns out, there aren’t a lot of good options for what to do with nuclear waste, or where to put it. There likely aren’t all that many places in the United States where nuclear material can be safely stored for one hundred or ten thousand years. And some of those places would likely be deemed unsuitable for other reasons: national security, too many people living nearby,⁠¹ too close to an important natural area.

And, last, but certainly not least, the U.S. government has also indicated that it wants to get the process right—at least that’s the premise of this project and the federal program that funded it at the Department of Energy. The vision is not to force a decision on any community, but rather for the process to proceed by mutual collaboration, in which the community, after becoming fully informed, freely decides, collectively, to become the host site for the facility.⁠²

Getting to “maybe” will be difficult. Getting to “yes” even more so.

That brings us back to the theme of this essay, living with the future. What does “fully informed” or “freely decides” mean when the facility in question—and the nuclear waste it stores—might be a part of the community for the next hundred years? Or the next ten thousand?

We can never truly know what the future will bring. So, how can we be more informed about the futures that hosting such a facility might bring about?

How can a community collectively imagine what might happen over such time frames, and then make a sensible decision to commit to a future on such flimsy, changeable insights?

How can a community consent not only for itself but for its future generations, and what kinds of imaginative leaps would that require?

It’s possible that you’re reading this book because you enjoy speculative fiction; or because you’re interested in how we might more impactfully bring imagination of the future into ways that people, organizations, and communities make decisions; or for any of a thousand other reasons that are unrelated to the purpose of the project that funded this book. If so, enjoy! We hope you find it thought-provoking and informative (and maybe even fun).

But it’s also possible that you’re living in a community—or are a leader in one—that’s part of, or considering being part of, the negotiation of an agreement with the U.S. government for the purpose of siting a future nuclear waste facility. If so, you are our primary audience. And you are facing hard questions.

Our hope is that this book can help communities like yours to better mobilize collective imagination and collaborative storytelling to inform their decision-making.

There may be some who propose that you approach your decision to host a nuclear waste storage facility rationally, considering only the facts. This book is not about that. How is that even possible, when the community’s future over the next century or more is at stake? Focusing only on what we can know with certainty means ignoring an enormous array of questions about the future that are surely relevant to such a choice.

This book is also not a how-to book. There’s no instruction set to build these futures, no user’s manual to help navigate uncertainties.

Finally, this isn’t a book that tries to tell your future for you. After all, we (the editors of this book) don’t know you. We don’t know where you live. We may not know anything about your community.

So, what kind of book is it, then?

It’s a prompt, of a sort, and a reader.

It’s a book that, first and foremost, we hope, will stimulate your imagination. Imagination is a tool for mapping complexities across multiple potential pathways and possibilities, as rivulets of consequence flow outward from present choices through myriad, intertwined aspects of modern life.

We do hope you’ll learn some things along the way—for example, about nuclear power, nuclear history, and nuclear policy. But the purpose of everything we’ve included in the book is to help give you different vantage points from which to contemplate the future: different-colored lenses to look through, in the form of various stories and essays and artworks, in a wide range of styles and tones, emanating from a variety of perspectives.

We also hope that the book will encourage you to take up the project of finding and telling shared stories. Stories give us a richer feel for the worlds that might emerge in the future, and what it might be like to live in them. They help us to understand the different paths the future might take, and hence help us exercise judgment and perhaps even take action to help shape or build the futures we might prefer.

Ideally, insights from such stories will supplement the facts you might learn from others about nuclear waste, helping you make sense of who you are, as a community, and whether nuclear waste is the right kind of neighbor for you for the next little while, or long while.

You might think of this book as an exercise gym for the mind, and for the community’s ability to imagine together what their shared future might bring. We hope that by reading it, discussing the stories, art, and essays, trying on some of its ideas, that your own capacity to imagine the future productively and collaboratively might grow.

Envisioning a shared future with nuclear waste is a tremendous imaginative challenge.

First, there’s lots to imagine.

What might happen to the waste over the next century or more? What might happen to the community—to its health, to its character, to its economy, to its environment—as a result of cohabiting with waste for the next century or more? Will it become, as Sarena Ulibarri’s story “Return to Sender” suggests, a focal point for community dialogue and debate? Or, as in Justina Ireland’s “City of Hillsville,” a largely invisible part of the landscape?

How might a nuclear waste facility reshape relationships within the community, among the myriad groups that comprise it?

What might stay the same in the future, what might change, and how might these continuities or disruptions make themselves felt? In turn, how might changes in the community alter its relationship with the nuclear waste living next door, or with the people managing it? Over time, how might your relationships play out with different groups who might be involved with the facility: workers, site managers, facility owners, the federal government, the nuclear industry?

What else might happen that could be important, when a community is considering whether or not it’s a good idea to host a nuclear waste storage site? What about climate change, for example? Will it make your part of the world hotter, drier, wetter, colder, more vulnerable to fire or hurricanes? Would that affect the facility, or its ability to be managed safely for generations? Or, thinking about Andrew Dana Hudson’s story “Pursuant to the Agreement,” how might the facility contribute to or shape future political conflict in and around your community?

Second, there are all of the competing sources of imagination.

Experts will imagine for you the risks of nuclear hazards and exposure. These will likely take the form of results derived from models—which are designed based on assumptions—that provide you with statistical data.

The facility owners and operators (which might be the federal government, but which might also be a private contractor) will want you to imagine them in control, knowing what they’re doing, safeguarding your community.

Advocates for the site will tell you how amazing the facility will be for the community’s future: all of the jobs they imagine will be created, the economic and financial benefits they want you to believe will flow to the community. Perhaps there will be a boost to the community’s reputation as a place that’s friendly to business, which could help attract other investors. Advocates will also present models and studies, but mostly they’ll paint an attractive vision of the community’s future, full of all the things that polls and surveys said you wanted.

Opponents of the site will tell you all the horror stories of what could go wrong. They’ll remind you of all the bad things that have happened elsewhere, of what happened when other people were exposed to nuclear radiation, of all the past times when the government and its cronies in the business world lied to communities.

Not surprisingly, many communities end up deeply divided over these kinds of decisions. And, hopefully, if that’s the case for you, the government walks away. Because if the facility is a source of division at this early, entirely theoretical stage of the process, that’s a sign that the community may find it hard to come to a healthy and informed agreement to move forward as a host site—that is, an agreement that won’t fester as a source of conflict for long into the future.

From our perspective, for a community to come to a free and fully informed decision to become a host site for a nuclear waste facility, it will be important for the community to take charge of its own collective imagination of the future, and to ensure the richness, vitality, vibrancy, and plurality of that imagination. The community as a whole should partake in generating and deliberating upon visions of its possible futures.

We, the editors, don’t know exactly what that means. We guess that it means doing collective and collaborative storytelling with greater depth and sophistication, more frequently, with broader community participation, than many communities are used to. But you’ll have to figure out what makes sense for you and yours.

The process will depend on the resources available: writers, storytellers, artists, and others with creative imagination and talent, local colleges, nearby scientific institutions, dedicated leaders, local museums and historical societies, Indigenous elders. Also, crucially, people who are willing to come together to talk about difficult subjects with sufficiently open minds to consider a wide range of possibilities about what might happen—and doing so without falling into the trap of thinking that the future can follow only one trajectory.

One suggestion: charge a group of people to think carefully about how to spark local imagination, and then create a process to talk collectively about the hopes, dreams, fears, and possibilities that emerge.

In that process, imagine what it might be like to live with nuclear waste as a neighbor for the next century or more. And maybe, taking a page from Carter Meland’s story “Generating Hope,” in this book, even imagine what the nuclear waste might think of being your neighbor.

Imagine what the facility will be like, where and how it will be situated on the land, and whether it will become an integral part of community life or whether it will be tucked away and isolated, something you rarely notice or care about unless there’s an emergency.

Imagine how the facility might perpetuate past trends that have shaped the community’s history, or launch new ones.

Imagine how the facility might be welcomed into the community’s annual cycles and periodic rituals (like WasteFest, described in Ulibarri’s “Return to Sender,” an annual event designed to catalyze and cultivate the community’s culture of recycling and circular economy) in ways that feel authentic but that also meaningfully engage the community in doing work that needs to get done, like periodically checking up on how things are going with the waste, and making sure that the responsible oversight agencies (at federal and state levels, and perhaps more) are doing their jobs with sufficient care and attention.

Imagine who might work at the facility and how they will be invited to become a part of the community. How might your community overcome what could otherwise become a tendency to see them as outsiders, or for them to see themselves that way?

Imagine how the future might be different for different parts of your community. How might decisions about a future nuclear waste facility affect those who have traditionally been left out or left behind? Would new groups of “have-nots” be created as a consequence of the decision? Who would be subject to what kinds of risks and hazards, whether to health, environment, economy, or social cohesion?

Imagine what kind of surveillance the community might want to have of the facility. How might it be watched over? What kinds of questions might be asked of those running it? What kinds of resources might the community want to have access to in seeking answers to those questions? How often will the community want to receive updates and reports? Who might want to be present at those moments? What powers or rights might they want to have for oversight, investigation, and accountability? These matters are especially urgent if the community ends up feeling that they’re not getting a straight story out of the facility or the government at some point in the future—or, in the worst case, if something goes wrong.

Perhaps most importantly, imagine who and what the community wants to be, in the future. What does the community want its own future to look like? What are the trajectories for getting from here to there? And how might this facility—and the various forms of support and compensation that the government or its operators might offer alongside, either at the outset or on an ongoing basis—be leveraged to build the community’s vision of a better future? Does everyone agree on these ideas? If not, how do those disagreements inform your collective ideas about the community, the waste, and what tomorrow might bring?

Imagine what the rest of the country owes you for taking on this responsibility—and what sorts of obligations it creates.

A lingering thought: Is this the only time the community wants to engage its future vis-à-vis nuclear waste? Or is that imaginative exercise something to be done periodically, as part of an ongoing updating of the relationship between the community and the facility?

And a final thought: Should the community’s efforts to imagine and deliberate the future involve the government (or the facility’s owner or operator, if the facility isn’t managed directly by the government) in some way? On the one hand, freedom of choice depends on sovereignty and independence over the future. It’s the community’s future that’s at stake. On the other hand, it can also be useful to enlist those who are potentially becoming invested in the community (as the site for their facility, at least, if not in other ways, too). They may have capabilities to help bring about a preferred future that the community isn’t aware of yet—for example, through the regulations they create for the site. And they should care about the community’s future, given that it will be a host for the facility, which will be part of the community’s journey (and the journey of the nation as a whole, as it continues to grapple with how to properly handle its growing pile of nuclear waste). Indeed, they’re about to become members of the community. It might be useful to know more about who they are, what matters to them, and what they’re dreaming about, too.

This book is a collection of stories, essays, and artwork inspired by our own contemplations about living with a future filled with nuclear waste.

In curating the collection, we worked with a variety of fiction writers, experts, artists, and facilitators, drawing the group together for a two-day immersive event of discussions, debates, lectures, meals, and collaborative storytelling. We call it a “narrative hackathon.” And then we sent everyone off to write their part of the book, with editorial help. (You can read a bit more about the process in the “About this Project” section of this book.)

Our goal was to create a collection of works, written and illustrated in a wide range of styles and genres. We hope that, through their resonances and dissonances, these works help you to advance the collaborative and collective imagination needed to inform your decision of whether to become a host site for a future U.S. nuclear waste facility.

We hope the collection helps to spark your own imagination of the future. As we said earlier, we haven’t tried to imagine your future. Only you can do that. But perhaps our stories and essays will help stimulate you to think about your future from different angles: Give you new ideas or aspects of the problem to think about. Give you characters, scenes, and plots to discuss and debate. Give you a reminder that there are many ways to think about the future, many lenses for doing so, and many paths the future might take.

Perhaps one of the stories will resonate particularly strongly for your community. Or another will catalyze some unrelated vision that helps anchor your community’s decision-making. Imagination is unpredictable like that. We just don’t know. But we’d love to hear what you figure out.

One of the things that we tried to do in putting this book together was to engage Indigenous writers, artists, thinkers, and sensibilities. You might want to do that too—along with other important constituencies within your community that have histories that could give you a different slant on a future with nuclear waste.

We’ve done this for many reasons. Indigenous communities have millennia-old spiritual traditions, wisdom, knowledge, and relationships with the land that offer unique perspectives on living with the Earth and its components. Nuclear materials are certainly one of those components. Indigenous communities also have long and not entirely happy histories with the federal government, with the energy industry, with the nuclear complex, and with settler and colonial institutions and attitudes. And they have different ways of looking at the future, and linking it to the past.

For all of these reasons, we found it invaluable to bring Indigenous experiences, perspectives, and storytelling into our creative mix, alongside insights from history, nuclear science and policy, and theories of human relationships with technology.

You might come from an Indigenous community or culture, or have Indigenous people in your community. If so, make the most of what they bring to the table. If not, there’s undoubtedly an Indigenous community near to you. You should consider inviting them to imagine with you.

This is one in a sequence of books through which we, the editors, have been using collaborative imagination and storytelling to explore how people might live with very different futures. The topics of other books in the sequence have included solar energy, climate change, spaceflight, artificial intelligence, and more.⁠³ In each book, we have collected a series of fictional stories of the future alongside works of visual art and essays designed to help give those stories context.

In two of the earlier books—The Weight of Light and Cities of Light—we learned something important that you may find helpful to think about: the future is a design space.⁠⁴

When we choose which technologies to share our future lives and selves with, as well as how to arrange our relationships with those technologies, we do far more than just choose tools. We design the very foundations of what it means to be human in the future. We reweave the social, economic, and environmental fabrics of our lives.

The choice about where to locate a nuclear waste storage facility—and how to integrate it into a community’s life and space—is just such a design choice. Through deciding whether to become a host site, the community is making a major choice about what futures to bring into being for itself, for the U.S., and for the world. Whatever ends up happening, it’s hard to imagine the future being the same in any way, shape, or form.

And, of course, that’s not the end of the design choices at stake. One of the central touchpoints in each of the stories in this volume is how the community chooses to design its relationship with the nuclear material itself. Design, here, is far more than what you might imagine it to be; it goes beyond, for instance, the architectural design of the storage facility and the engineering of its radiation shielding. Design is what this nuclear material comes to mean within the community’s sense of itself, its responsibilities to its members, and its commitments to the rest of the world, as well as its responsibilities to the nuclear material and to the Earth and universe from which that material comes and to which it will, eventually, return.

Each of the four fiction stories in this book explores this theme of design in its own unique way.

In “Return to Sender,” by Sarena Ulibarri, design is an ongoing process of negotiation. An already nuclear community, a major city with a nuclear power plant outside town, takes it upon itself to host its own waste—at least until a permanent storage facility gets built. Rejecting the idea that rural landscapes and communities are somehow “empty” places, the city reflexively grapples with why they’ve asked others to bear the risks and burdens of storing its waste, when the power plant has largely benefited them. After a half-century of being an interim site, however, some in the community begin to ask whether a permanent site will ever be built—or whether, instead, they’ve been left holding a bag that neither they nor their grandparents, who signed the agreement, consented to. Making things more uncertain, the casks that contain the nuclear waste are aging and may be degrading. What should the city do next? It’s complicated. How do we live with the future? How do we sort out our relationships with nuclear waste over generations, within families, between urban and rural places, between our own communities and the wider societies within which we exist?

Things couldn’t be more different in Justina Ireland’s “City of Hillsville,” a community on the edge of somewhere (there’s really just one subtle hint about the location hidden in the story…), full of busy people who mostly don’t care about what’s around them or even, in the end, that there’s a nuclear waste storage site in town. Life goes on. Some particularly loud people in the community don’t get along with one another, and they disagree politically. So, they find themselves, predictably, on different sides of the nuclear issue. After a bit of a fuss, the town’s residents set up a community committee, negotiate a plan with the town council and the federal government, and get on with their business, including enjoying the new sports complex they got out of the deal. It’s not quite farce. But it reflects a deep reality about today’s complex technological societies and economies. For the most part, we go about our life, work, and play without thinking much about the systems whirring around us—water, food, energy, manufacturing, chemicals, materials, transportation, supply chains—until there’s a disaster. Fortunately, no disaster here. Yet. Life goes on.

In “Generating Hope,” Carter Meland poses the question: If nuclear material is wrapped up safely and securely, why not just live with it? Imagine a caskette of shielded, highly radioactive material in the living room. In this alternate history of the twentieth-century U.S., each family takes ownership of a little nuclear piece of responsibility for the past, present, and future of the technological systems and economies of which we’re part. And, then, what if our Indigenous neighbors and predecessors are right? What if the Earth really is alive? If the material in the cask is a “we” and part of a much larger “we,” transformed through the eons, entangled with our human lives for only the briefest moment in its universe-long lifetime? Can we share sensibilities with such beings? Truly bring them into our lives, our memories, our relationships? It’s a story, in the end, about duty to care: for each other, for family, for community, for the Earth, and for the impacts of our actions in the world. And about our place in the universe.

And then there’s Arizona’s Signal Mountain Wilderness, the Fracture of the United States, and Andrew Dana Hudson’s story “Pursuant to the Agreement.” The story tackles the bureaucratic—yet grave—responsibilities of managing an interim nuclear waste storage site amidst the shattered remains of the USA, a fragmented future of divergent and shifting techno-politics in the southwestern part of North America following the secession of California from the Union. Successful negotiations of the passage of nuclear waste across (now international) state lines give way to navigating political and military minefields, reclaiming former nuclear power plant sites, and over time, transforming the Signal Mountain facility into a permanent geological waste repository—and, of course, the reunification of the country. Along the way, we don’t learn much about the nearby neighbors (other than that the site truly is a bunker, in the desert, far away from town, surrounded by cacti). But we learn a lot about what it means to take one’s responsibilities seriously across the shifting and uncertain vicissitudes of time and space, land and borders, institutions and agreements.

Becoming a host community for a nuclear waste storage facility is to take on a new and deep responsibility. To take up a new place in the universe. To reposition oneself and one’s neighbors in relationship to many other aspects of the world—social, economic, environmental, and technological.

A host community becomes the storage site for important and dangerous materials that will be with them for a century, and perhaps a hundred centuries.⁠⁵

A host community becomes a place that agrees to take this material from other places so that communities in those places, who were not given a chance to negotiate and agree to store this waste for the long term, are no longer burdened by its risks and responsibilities.

A host community becomes a node in a national, and perhaps international, nuclear industry. Your decision would help the nuclear industry fulfill its obligations to future generations, at least temporarily, by enabling a new way of storing nuclear waste that many view as safer and more secure. In turn, with its waste problem “solved,” the industry may be better positioned to argue that it can help contribute to the world’s future energy needs. And that may be important for tackling climate change, if we collectively envision nuclear energy to be an integral part of confronting our planetary emergency.

A host community becomes a part of the nuclear world—the nuclear complex—perhaps colonized by it, orchestrated by the logics of technology and industry. But perhaps also an agent of transformation, through which those logics are brought back into dialogue with the logics of nature and community. Generating hope.

Alongside the stories, the essays in this book provide important context. How the U.S. government has handled nuclear waste in the past. How they’ve treated communities. How some people, in governments and outside of them, hope to treat communities differently. What a “discount rate” is—and why you should really, really care. How to weight the future against the present. Some of the ideas and possibilities that you might bring to the table during a collaborative siting process. How nuclear waste fits into the larger structures of the nuclear energy industry. Why nuclear energy inevitably carries with it the memories and histories of nuclear weapons. How Indigenous communities think about land and our responsibilities to care for it. The many dimensions of living in a future with nuclear waste next door.

This book is part of a project in which communities were asked to consider what they would want from a process for selecting a host community for a nuclear waste storage facility. For what it’s worth, the communities invited to participate in this larger project were deliberately chosen because they’re not good sites for nuclear waste storage—at least not as far as what’s traditionally imagined by nuclear scientists and government bureaucrats. No one wants this project to seem like a Trojan horse for springing a nuclear waste facility on an unwilling or unaware community. What the government—specifically, its Department of Energy—wants to know is what communities think about how they can best be brought into the process of siting a nuclear waste facility.

We hope that this book helps communities think about how consent can be informed through collective imagination about the future. As we write, the larger project of which this book is a part is still ongoing. We very much look forward to feedback on our book from the communities who participate.

Make of all this what you will. It’s yours as much as ours. And it’s definitely not any sort of authoritative blueprint. Seek out better ideas and visions wherever you can find them.

We wish you the very best with your imaginative explorations.

Good luck with your decision.

Live well with your future.

Notes

About the Contributors

Fiction Authors

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, and futurist. He is the author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, and his short fiction has appeared in Slate, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and more. He holds a master’s degree in Sustainability from Arizona State University, where he is now pursuing a master’s in fine arts in Creative Writing.

Justina Ireland is the author of novels including Ophie’s Ghosts, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction; Dread Nation, winner of the Locus Award; and Deathless Divide, a Locus Award nominee. She has written several novels in the Star Wars universe for Disney Lucasfilm Press, and is one of the story architects of Star Wars: The High Republic. She is the former editor-in-chief of FIYAH, an award-winning literary magazine of Black speculative fiction.

Carter Meland is a speculative fiction author, poet, and associate professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is the author of the novel Stories for a Lost Child, a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His writing has appeared in the journals Studies in American Indian Literatures and Yellow Medicine Review, and the books Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixelated Skins and Enduring Critical Poses: The Legacy and Life of Anishinaabe Literature and Letters.

Sarena Ulibarri is a speculative fiction author, editor, and anthologist. Her short stories have appeared in Tractor Beam, DreamForge, and The Sunday Morning Transport, and her essays have appeared in Strange Horizons and Grist. She is the author of two novellas, Another Life and Steel Tree. As editor-in-chief at World Weaver Press, she curated several international volumes of optimistic climate fiction, including Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures.

Essayists

Nicole Cox is a PhD student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on America’s nuclear legacy, including weaponry development and waste storage, and investigates creative approaches to engaging communities in imagining nuclear futures.

Alycia de Mesa holds a PhD in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She is a senior global futures scholar at Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and Indigenous education specialist for the Firekeepers Initiative at Labriola National American Indian Data Center.

Myrriah Gómez is an associate professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico and a member of the research faculty at the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute. Her book Nuclear Nuevo México (2022) examines the effects of settler colonialism and the nuclear-industrial complex in New Mexico.

Nafeesa Irshad is a doctoral candidate in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. Her academic background is in environmental sciences, and her doctoral research explores decarbonization processes and associated challenges for small businesses.

Krzysztof Janas is a sociologist and social anthropologist. At the University of Warsaw, he conducts social research on architecture, design, and new technologies to better understand the production of buildings, cities, and environments in the context of sustainable development and climate change. In 2023 and 2024, he was a visiting Fulbright researcher at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He has received grants and research scholarships from the National Science Centre in Poland, the City of Warsaw, and the Stefan Kuryłowicz Foundation.

Christopher F. Jones is a historian of energy transitions, infrastructure, sustainability, and economic growth at Arizona State University. He is the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (2014) and The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion (2025).

Allison M. Macfarlane is professor and director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She formerly directed the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University. From 2012–2014, she chaired the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the first geologist and first woman to serve in that role, and from 2010–2012, she served on the White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.

Jennifer Richter is an assistant professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is also a senior global futures scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She studies how policies that govern innovations and research are created and then taken up by local populations, especially in the American West. Her research focuses particularly on energy justice, specifically related to the cultural, social, and environmental issues that come with larger energy transitions. She coedited the book Environmental Realism: Challenging Solutions (2017) and contributed a chapter to the book Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific (2024).

Ian H. Rowlands is a professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. In his research, he investigates issues related to sustainable energy, focusing upon politics, strategies, behavior, actors, regimes, and institutions at multiple levels, from the household to the global scale.

Artist

Dwayne Manuel, hailing from the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community, found his artistic calling through drawing, influenced by his mother, a skilled O’odham basket weaver. After earning a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, he pursued an MFA at the University of Arizona. Now, he teaches painting and drawing while exhibiting his work at esteemed venues like The Heard Museum and collaborating with brands like Nike.

Editors

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and assistant director of Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America that explores emerging technologies, policy, and society. He has edited books of science fiction and nonfiction with partners and funders including NASA, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the MIT Press, and Columbia University Press.

Clark A. Miller is a theorist and designer of techno-human relationships and systems with a passion for imagining and creating alternative, human-centered energy futures that foster individual and community thriving and justice. An expert in the social drivers, dynamics, and consequences of energy system change, he serves as director of the Center for Energy and Society and professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.

Ruth Wylie is the co-director of the Center for Science and the Imagination and an associate research professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University. Her research areas include science and engineering ethics, educational technologies, and fostering and assessing human imagination. She leads the Arizona STEM Acceleration Project to develop a robust science, technology, and engineering education ecosystem across the state of Arizona.

Credits

Editors
Clark A. Miller
Ruth Wylie
Joey Eschrich 

Research Project Team
Mahmud Farooque
Jennifer Richter
Nicholas Weller
Farah Najar Arevalo
Somaly Jaramillo Hurtado

Cover Design
Nina Miller

Ebook Design
Emily Buckell
Tobias S. Buckell

Book, PDF and HTML Design
Nina Miller

Student Researchers
Olivia Brobin
Deanna Chaney

Special Thanks
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Linsey Wilt and Deron Ash for their tremendous help in managing this project, and to the team at the Center for Science and the Imagination for their support in organizing the narrative hackathon that launched this book. We also want to express our particular thanks to Mahmud Farooque, Jennifer Richter, and Nicholas Weller for inviting us to participate in their larger project.

Acknowledgement of Funding from the U.S. Department of Energy

This book is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Award Number DE-NE0009331.

The mission of the Energy Department is to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions. Learn more at energy.gov. Logo was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy to indicate receipt of DOE funding. Not an endorsement by DOE.

This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.

The U.S. Department of Energy did not review the materials published in this book prior to its publication.