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Vincent Ialenti is an American government official and Anthropology 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 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. He is also a Research Associate at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt's Department of Environmental Studies. Prior to his federal service, Ialenti was a MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs and held fellowships at the University of Southern California, the University of British Columbia, The Berggruen Institute, and Cornell University's Society for the Humanities.
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, he taught an interdisciplinary writing seminar called Nuclear Imagination: Technology and Worlds. In 2017, he became the first anthropologist with a feature article in Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics.
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 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 app podcast about long-term thinking.
Ialenti is an Associate of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, California.
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