Verde Valley News – Arizona State University’s (ASU) Consent-Based Citing Project is bringing Consortium for Community Engagement, Innovation and Learning for Consent-Based Siting in Arizona (CCEIL-AZ) to Camp Verde Community Library Friday, May 17th and Saturday, May 18th. This project seeks to help communities host conversations about big decisions, like where to put a power plant or how to build vibrant neighborhoods or invest in new projects.
Prior to the CCEIL-AZ conversation, on Friday, May 17th from 5-6:30p ASU professor Dr. Jen Richter will discuss our nuclear past and present, and how nuclear energy will change in the future. There is no registration required for this program.
Then, on Saturday, May 18th from 9:00a– 2:00p ASU Professor Nicholas Weller from the ASU Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes will facilitate the conversation. Weller’s team is working with community groups across the state to host small community dialogues about how they’d like their community to make decisions. At these dialogues, 15-20 people from each community will discuss how they’d like to make decisions about their community and its priorities for the future. Then they’ll discuss their priorities and concerns for a what a decision-making process should look like regarding where a nuclear waste storage facility might be built. We want to know what people from all walks of life think is a fair process. Anyone interested in attending must register for the Saturday program at links.asu.edu/camp-verde-dialogue and respond to an approximate 5-minute questionnaire. Registrants will be chosen by Weller’s team of researchers to participate in the community conversation.
ASU is doing the CCEIL-AZ project to inform a future process for where a nuclear waste storage might be built. However, they are not volunteering Arizona as a place to store nuclear waste. The project is funded by the US Department of Energy to help inform how they might use a consent-based siting process for nuclear waste storage in the future. Consent-based siting focuses on the needs and concerns of communities who might volunteer to host a waste storage facility. ASU hopes to help the Department of Energy create processes that work for any communities that want to engage with them and will be developing community engagement tools to help with these conversations. They will study what works and what doesn’t and share those findings and tools with their partner communities to use in ways that work for them.
Importantly, the challenges with deciding where to put nuclear waste are similar to challenges with other topics, like where to put landfills and highways, or how to prioritize new industries that bring jobs to Arizona. For example, all these topics have long term consequences for communities, both good and bad. Historically, these decisions haven’t involved communities, and we want to change that.
One of the goals of this project to help communities engage in democratic decision making about where things are built and how communities benefit from those decisions. For example, some people in a community might want a new mine or power plant to help support local jobs and to promote state or nation-wide progress. Others might see these projects as hazardous and may want guarantees that the community will not get stuck with a mess when their kids grow up. The CCEIL_AZ project can build tools to help communities—and Arizona—make informed decisions about what goes in their backyard.
What will ASU do with the data collected from these dialogues?
The data collected during these dialogues will help do three things. In 2025, ASU plans to host 5 public forums across Arizona with 60-80 people at each to further explore what a fair process for siting a nuclear waste facility in the U.S. should look like. We’ll use the data from the dialogues to help build those deliberative forum activities. Second, we want to build tools that communities can use to have conversations about their own big decisions. The data we collect from our dialogues will help us build conversation guides, lessons for classrooms, and other tools to help foster those conversations. Finally, these dialogues are a great opportunity to hear about the concerns, hopes, and priorities for the future of communities across the state. We plan to synthesize what we learn from each of these dialogues into a report that we can share with community groups, researchers, and policy makers in Arizona to help give a voice to those priorities and concerns.
Camp Verde Community Library is located just off Montezuma Castle Highway at 130 N Black Bridge Road, Camp Verde AZ. For more information about this or any other library program, visit the library’s website at www.cvlibrary.org or call 554-8380.