Speakers

Dr. Allison Macfarlane
Four Things You Should Know about Nuclear Waste

How dangerous is nuclear waste to humans and the environment, and what can we do about it? Nuclear or radioactive waste was first created as a by-product of plutonium and uranium production to power nuclear weapons. Today, the main source of nuclear waste is the nuclear power industry. Pressures posed by the potential for catastrophic climate change may result in a large global expansion of nuclear power and the implications for nuclear waste disposal are large. Nuclear waste is highly toxic and it’s impossible to eliminate all of it. Therefore, society must make difficult policy decisions about how to safely and effectively dispose of this material. The preferred choice is emplacing it in a mined, geologic repository. In the United States, Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the site identified by the federal government for waste disposal, has become a highly debated location.

Dr. Allison Macfarlane is an Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as well as an Affiliate of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She has held fellowships at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She has served on National Academy of Sciences panels on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons issues, and currently serves on the Keystone Center’s Energy Board and the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her research focuses on international security and environmental policy issues associated with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. MIT Press published her book, Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, which explores the unresolved technical issues for nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

 

Dr. Terry Collins
Green Chemistry and the Future

Green chemistry, which began in 1991, is the design of chemical products and processes that will reduce or eliminate substances hazardous to human health and the environment. The requirement to focus on reducing hazardous substances brings novel intellectually demanding, ethically appealing material to chemistry education. Green chemists are already providing less toxic and cost effective approaches to a variety of industrial processes and products and the opportunity landscape for researchers is enormous. The design, chemistry and applications of iron-TAML activators will be described as an example of progress. Iron-TAML activators are the first truly effective small-molecule mimics of the peroxidase enzymes. They activate hydrogen peroxide and other oxidizing agents to produce a platform technology for green oxidation processes, promising improvements in environmental protection and benefits to human health.

Dr. Terry Collins is the Thomas Lord Professor of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University where he directs the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry. He taught the first university course in green chemistry at Carnegie Mellon, beginning in 1992, and he writes and lectures widely on how chemists can promote sustainability, delivering more than 450 public lectures. Collins also is an Honorary Professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research is focused on greening the historically dirty area of oxidation chemistry by designing nontoxic catalysts for activating the natural oxidants, hydrogen peroxide and oxygen. His widely patented TAML activators promise to revolutionize peroxide chemistry, allowing it to substitute more effectively for chlorine and metal-based processes and to enable much more effective processes for destroying in water recalcitrant pollutants and hardy pathogens.

 

Dr. Warren P. Porter
The Big Picture: Linking Pesticide Science and Health Effects

There is rapidly growing evidence that environmentally relevant common chemical exposures are capable of altering our children’s learning abilities, immune function, hormone levels and developmental patterns. I will present research from many sources including our own that document what environmental chemicals may be doing to our health and our future. I also will discuss alternatives that are presently available for dealing with these challenges in a constructive, healthy and economical way.

Dr. Warren P. Porter is a Professor of Zoology, Professor of Environmental Toxicology and an Invited Affiliate in Engineering Physics at the University Wisconsin–Madison. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an undergraduate and the University of California–Los Angeles for his graduate work, earning a master’s degree in ichthyology, then switched to physiological ecology. Porter received a postdoctoral fellowship with a physicist-turned-botanist David Gates, who was interested in climate effects on plants and developed with him a general model for how animals interact with climate. Since returning to UW–Madison as a faculty member, Porter has taken approximately 50 courses in 16 different departments on campus to broaden his technical competence and expand his interdisciplinary research programs. He recently completed two aeronautics courses in engineering mechanics to understand how leatherback sea turtles work. His environmental toxicology research centers on how do climate, disease and environmental contaminants affect the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems and developmental processes and capacity to grow, reproduce, and survive at local and landscape scales?