News Updates

“Public support for nuclear power is the highest its been in more than a decade,” the Los Angeles Times reports, with younger people especially seeing “a second renaissance.” For this shift to best succeed, Aditi Verma and Denia Djokić call for transforming nuclear engineering education. “Our vision for a new approach is grounded in long-standing calls for a bridging between the sciences and the humanities,” they write in Issues. “We need to stop separating the social from the technological, and imprint these insights into our education so that they can be embedded in policy and design of nuclear energy technologies.”

Over the past several years, high-profile unionization efforts have succeeded in workplaces including Starbucks and Amazon. Labor unions have won or negotiated new contracts with auto manufacturers, Hollywood studios, UPS, and, most recently, Boeing. Polling finds that public support for unions is at its highest point in half a century. 

This labor resurgence is occurring just as technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and other forms of automation are poised to dramatically change the workplace. Not only does this mean that workers should have a say in the implementation of these technologies, write Amanda Ballantyne, Jodi Forlizzi, and Crystal Weise, but centering workers in tech development can also improve the technologies themselves.

Since “workers are often best positioned to identify potential risks, practical limitations, and unintended consequences of a technology in real workplace settings,” Ballantyne and her coauthors argue, “workers’ voices are a crucial resource for making innovative technologies trusted and effective, so their full benefits can be realized for society.”

Los Angeles is set to build a new facility for recycling wastewater into drinking water. When completed in 2027, it will produce 20 million gallons per day, enough to supply about 250,000 people. Until now, technologists and policymakers often met public resistance to reusing wastewater for human consumption, due in part to what Christy Spackman calls the “yuck” factor. In Issues, she describes how advocates of wastewater recycling are working to move people from “yuck” to “yum,” where the final product is not only enjoyable but connects with positive social, cultural, and aesthetic experiences to create new memories.

In the next congressional session, Republicans will hold slim majorities in both the House and Senate. As they seek to advance their legislative priorities, energy policies will be high on the list. Energy innovation—particularly so-called technology-push policies that incentivize research and development—has long enjoyed bipartisan support, with lawmakers eager to bring federal funding and resources to their states and districts.

But David M. Hart encourages policymakers to consider supporting demand-pull policies, which “use direct spending, tax incentives, regulatory authority, and other tools to pull innovations into practice by encouraging users to adopt early versions of them, hastening the development of productive feedback loops.” Such demand-pull policies complement the supply of new—and often expensive—energy technologies by reducing risk and making them more cost competitive.

Demand-pull policies have their critics, and Hart notes that such policies must be crafted to encourage competition and drive cost reductions and performance improvements. Whether to advance nuclear, hydrogen, fossil fuels, or other energy innovations, demand-pull policies can be integral to a higher-performing, cleaner, more affordable, and more secure US energy system.

A wind-driven wildfire in Southern California has burned more than 20,000 acres, destroyed or damaged more than 200 homes and other structures, injured multiple people, and forced massive evacuation, Newsweek reports. As this is just the latest in a pattern of destructive fires to hit the region in recent years, it is important to pay attention to how wildfires and other natural disasters affect low-income communities of color, including undocumented Latino and Indigenous migrants, Michael Méndez argues in Issues. “Every aspect of a disaster—including vulnerabilities, preparedness, response, and rebuilding—is to some extent a social calculus.”

Who does science and technology policy? Sometimes even the field’s practitioners aren’t so sure. John Andelin, once assistant director of the Office of Technology Assessment, tells a story about working on Capitol Hill as an unofficial science advisor to a congressman in the early 1970s: “I was asked to give a speech on ‘science policy.’ I mentioned it to a colleague, saying that I didn’t know anything about it. His response, after laughing, was that that’s what I did.”

Understanding who works in science and tech policy is important. Their day-to-day activities influence whether and how individuals and communities thrive in the modern world. The pace of biomedical innovation; society’s ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change; the development and regulation of cutting-edge technologies like nanotech and artificial intelligence—these issues and many more are shaped by people in this relatively unknown field.

So Issues conducted a survey. We wanted to explore how the community defines itself; the paths that lead to careers in science and tech policy; practitioners’ motivations, activities, and opinions on how the field is changing; and what the future holds for science and technology policymaking. The results, as written up by Josh Trapani and Katherine Santos Pavez, present a fascinating—and even surprising—snapshot of a large, diverse, and dynamic field.

Explore the findings of our science and technology policy survey.

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