The following are tentative plans for the Fall 2011 Global Issues Colloquium:
Thursday, September 1, 2011, 7pm
Jason Wiles (Biologist)
Thursday, October 20, 2011, 7pm
Uranium Communities and Nuclear Renaissance: Energy and Environmental Justice on the Colorado Plateau
Stephanie A. Malin, PhD Candidate, Environmental Sociology; Sociology of Globalization/Development, Utah State University
Abstract: Global renewal of nuclear energy – a nuclear renaissance – has been proposed as one viable solution to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts. For example, in 2010 the Obama Administration approved $50 billion in loans for new nuclear reactor construction, and China has been rapidly adding to their cadre of such facilities. I contend such assertions and actions must be examined sociologically; we must avoid framing nuclear power as a socially sustainable ‘renewable energy’ without first empirically examining emergent social impacts, especially in rural communities embedded within global systems such as uranium markets. In this presentation, I focus on the first phase of the nuclear fuel cycle – namely, uranium mining and milling – tracing the emergence of competing discourses and patterns of political mobilization in response to renewed uranium processing on the Colorado Plateau in the western US. Specifically, I examine the regulatory and social movement contexts surrounding Energy Fuels, Inc.’s acquisition of both a special use permit and radioactive materials license to build Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill in Colorado’s Paradox Valley. As the first uranium mill permitted in the US since the Cold War’s end, the Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill provides a natural laboratory to study energy policy formation, land use conflict, and potential spaces for conflict resolution that are globally relevant, given nuclear power’s global use and controversy, and given that China will be a buyer of the yellowcake from PR Mill. I draw from mixed data sources, including in-depth interviews, regulatory and historical-archival analyses, and a household survey instrument distributed to residents in four communities closest to the proposed mill site. As such, this presentation helps illuminate local, rural effects of energy policy in our increasingly globalized economy.
Thursday, November 17, 7pm: Marc Rice