“[What’s] not so well-appreciated is you need a well-trained force of technical people running the reactor,” explains Stanford nuclear security expert Rodney Ewing. “If their work is disrupted, if they’re kept captive, or if they’re not allowed to rest, as was the case at Chernobyl, that is a major concern."

So-called small modular reactors are promoted as less expensive and cumbersome than conventional light-water reactors. Research led by former postdoctoral scholar Lindsay Krall with Stanford nuclear security expert Rodney Ewing suggests the volume and chemistry of the waste they produce may pose safety challenges.

Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants, according to research from Stanford and the University of British Columbia.

"Clearly, a nuclear reactor is not a nuclear bomb – reactors are designed to avoid runaway chain reactions," Stanford nuclear security expert Rod Ewing writes in an op-ed. But there are three vulnerabilities that can have serious consequences, he explains.

“We are in the middle of a war with great devastation and human suffering and deaths and adding a nuclear event – even if it is minor releases of radioactivity – to the present situation, that is really a heavy burden,” says Stanford Earth professor Rod Ewing.

Stanford University experts are cautiously optimistic that the Biden administration can change the U.S. trajectory on nuclear waste, and they offer their thoughts on how it can be done.

A decade after a powerful earthquake and tsunami set off the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown in Japan, Stanford experts discuss revelations about radiation from the disaster, advances in earthquake science related to the event and how its devastating impact has influenced strategies for tsunami defense and local warning systems.

“In some cases, as we become more sophisticated, we’ve lost the ability to see what’s most obvious,” said Rod Ewing, Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at Stanford. “You calculate the probability of an event against the expense – and often cost is the driver.”

A new study reveals particles that were released from nuclear plants damaged in the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami contained small amounts of radioactive plutonium.

Stanford Earth's Rodney Ewing and Wendy Mao help discover a new way to create diamonds by "cheating" thermodynamics.  

With the right amount of pressure and surprisingly little heat, a substance found in fossil fuels can transform into pure diamond.

"It's not a surprise that no one would support Yucca," says Stanford's Rodney Ewing, who led a 2018 study that recommended moving responsibility for disposing of nuclear waste to an independent nonprofit corporation.

Nuclear waste must be moved to dry-cast storage, which "is probably safe for tens of hundreds of years but shouldn’t be considered a final solution," says Rod Ewing .

Yucca Mountain has suffered from "technical and political disagreement" for decades, says Rod Ewing of Stanford. "There's an understandable pressure to do something with at least some of the waste."

Microscopic particles unleashed by the nuclear plant's explosions may pose an under-recognized health risk – a discovery that has been not very welcomed in Japan, says Rod Ewing of Stanford Earth.

Nuclear security expert Rod Ewing discusses new recommendations for solving the U.S. nuclear waste problem, why conventional risk assessments don’t go far enough and what makes this challenge more difficult than putting a man on the moon.

Expert Rodney C. Ewing discusses how failure to implement a permanent solution for nuclear waste storage and disposal is costing Americans billions of dollars per year. 

The award recognizes this Stanford Earth professor's success in breaking down barriers between scientific disciplines.