The Intersection of Land, Indigenous peoples, and Nuclear Power: Through the Lens of two Princeton Affiliated Interviewees [Dr. William Happer and Jessica Lambert]

By Angie Allen, Ella Weber, and Christine Shin

Special Thanks to Professor Ryo Morimoto, Jessica Lambert, and Dr. William Happer

When each of us signed up for spring courses during our freshman year at Princeton, we had little insight to the intricacies of Nuclear Princeton. Before the start of the semester, Ella Weber, a member of MHA (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) nation, an American Indian Tribe from Minnesota, became involved with Natives at Princeton, and was aware of the Nuclear Princeton project. However, Christine and I (Angie Allen), did not have much knowledge about the intersection of land, people, and nuclear power. Throughout the semester, we have discovered the impacts, as well as the historic relationship that nuclear weapons have had on/with indigenous peoples. Through a series of interviews with Dr. William Happer, and Jessica Lambert, we gather their perspectives, and reflect on what we have learned from them.

Dr. William Happer completed his Undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and later got his PhD here at Princeton in 1964. Following graduation, he completed his postdoctoral work at Columbia University. He became a professor and eventually the director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. In the 80s he returned to Princeton as a physics professor, moving back to raise a family outside of New York City. Happer worked as a professor sporadically until 2014, taking time away from Princeton to work for several organizations, including the U.S. Department of Energy. One of his biggest contributions to nuclear weapons and physics was his ideas that led to the creation of the artificial guide star, a key defense mechanism in the world of nuclear weapons. He also was highly involved in the JASON advisory group, a collection of scientists that worked for the American government and military, mostly performing classified research. He was appointed in 2018 as the senior director of the National Security Council office for emerging technologies under the Trump administration. He later resigned from the council in 2019 and is now a professor emeritus here at Princeton.

We chose to Interview William Happer because of his long-time involvement with the Physics Department at Princeton. We later learned he spent most of his childhood in Oak Ridge Tennessee, one of the prime locations of the Manhattan project, where his mother worked as a health care specialist. He has had amazing contributions to his field, and great insight to nuclear weapons, and power throughout our interview. Here’s what he had to say:

Angie Allen: How has your experience as both a graduate student and a professor at Princeton influenced your career?

Happer: Well, when I graduated from undergraduate school at Chapel Hill, I had offers to go to grad school in different places. I asked my uncle, who was a physicist, and he said, if you really want to get a good education, Princeton's your best bet. They were very supportive of doing graduate research. I thought I got a good education.

I left Princeton for many years, to do a postdoc at Columbia in New York City. I was at Columbia for 15 years, and Columbia was also a great place. It couldn't have been more different than Princeton. Not so much the physics departments, which had a lot of similarities. There were a lot of kids who had wealthy parents who had been to Princeton, and their grandparents had been to Princeton. Columbia was very different. I thought they were a lot more like the kids I went to school with in North Carolina than the ones at Princeton, they all had come from hard backgrounds. That's changed [here at Princeton]. For the better.

“I asked my uncle, who was a physicist, and he said, if you really want to get a good education, Princeton's your best bet.”

My wife and I had a couple of kids, and we were a little bit worried about them growing up in the urban environment. When my friends asked me if I'd come back [to Princeton], I wouldn't have come back for physics, but for the kids. I haven't regretted it. I mean, it's been a good, good place, but Columbia would have been equally good. And, you know, the city is nice, too. There's sort of a vitality in the city that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Ella Weber: Your time as a student was during a very influential period for the United States and the university. How would you describe the tensions of the Cold War from the perspective of a Princeton physics student?

I left Princeton for many years to do a postdoc at Columbia in New York City. I was at Columbia for 15 years, and Columbia was also a great place. It couldn't have been more different than Princeton. Not so much the physics departments, which had a lot of similarities. There were a lot of kids who had wealthy parents who had been to Princeton, and their grandparents had been to Princeton. Columbia was very different. I thought they were a lot more like the kids I went to school with in North Carolina than the ones at Princeton, they all had come from hard backgrounds. That's changed [here at Princeton]. For the better.

I still remember World War Two, a real war, not the Cold War. My father was fighting in North Africa, and my mom and I were dodging submarines, trying to get back to America from India. Compared to that, the Cold War didn't seem all that worrisome to me, but it certainly had a huge influence on American society and on physics.

For example, at the time in graduate school, you had to demonstrate you could read two foreign languages. My grandmother was a German speaking American, so I already knew some German. I thought well, Russians just launched Sputnik so maybe I should try and learn Russian. One direct influence it [the Cold War] had on me was, my second foreign language, you know, to read a scientific article (to prove literacy), and then I got interested in Russian because of its wonderful literature. You know, poetry, Pushkin is unrivaled. I sort of forgot about science, but I would read a little poetry every day. When I went to New York City, there was a large Russian American community there. I hung around with them to improve my spoken Russian.

“The Cold War didn’t seem all that worrisome to me, but it certainly had a huge influence on American society and on physics.”

I never thought the Russians were an existential threat in any sense. I thought they were run by a rational group of leaders who were not going to commit suicide with a nuclear war or anything like that. I regretted that we were wasting so much money. So much spending on the military was unnecessary. I'm not the right person to argue that.

Another big influence the Cold War had on me was that I did get involved with the military very intimately. After I went to Columbia, during the Vietnam War, there was a lot of unrest. Columbia University was occupied by protesters. They occupied our physics building and I had a laboratory. I didn't want them to damage our equipment. They were threatening to tear everything up. We're [Columbia Physics at the time] supposedly helpers, helpers to the military. They were threatening to tear up my lab. My students and I and the other young faculty members stayed in our buildings for 24 hours a day. In fact, within a day we couldn't get out. I had to call my wife and ask her to bring blankets and throw sandwiches through the window.

Some of the older professors were members of this group called JASON. I'd never heard of it until this happened. I got such a sour taste for the demonstrators; they caused a lot of damage to our building. A year or two later, when someone asked me, “would you like to join JASON? We need someone with your science background.” I said, well, if that gang [of protestors] was against it, that's good enough for me. For me, it [the protests] had the opposite effect that I think it was supposed to have. I saw one side that I did not want to be on. I got to see a lot of heavily classified science that was related to defense. It turned out in many cases; I knew more than they did about it. I was able to make a reputation that I would not have made if I was not associated with this group.

For example, I'm probably best known as the inventor of the sodium GuideStar. So, if you go to any modern observatory, in Hawaii, or Chile, or somewhere like that, at night, you'll often see this yellow laser beam shining up to the sky in the direction they're looking, that's my invention. All big telescopes have it today. I didn't invent it because of astronomy. I mean, I knew it would be useful for astronomy, but in the early days of the cold wars, they were talking about any possible way to defend against incoming missiles. A Laser has the advantage that the energy moves at the speed of light, but it has the disadvantage that it won't go through clouds. Even if it's a clear day, like today, a beautiful, clear sky, a laser beam through the sky breaks up into lots of little sub beams, each of which is so weak that it can't cause any damage to the target.

I said [to a JASON conference] well, I know how to fix this problem. You can make an artificial star and use the artificial star to measure how the atmosphere is distorted. It's called adaptive optics. It only works if you have a bright star to use as the source of light. I happened to know that there was this layer of sodium at 100 kilometers and that sodium atoms were very good scatters of light. They took my invention back to Washington and had critics look at it. Within a year, they acquired a boatload of money to build the laser I had asked for. They had it built at a secret Observatory in New Mexico, South of Albuquerque, out in the desert, so no one would see what they were doing. They brought the laser there, turned it on, and it worked the first time, worked like a charm. That gave me a lot of credibility in the defense community. So, from then on, I could ask for basically whatever I wanted.

I would have had a completely different career without the Cold War. I mean, even when I was doing that [inventing the Guide Star], it never occurred to me that the war was a serious problem. I thought the laser defense was an interesting physics problem. They kept it very heavily classified top secret for nearly 10 years. After the end of the Cold War, it was finally declassified thanks to the efforts of a young lady named Claire. She was a graduate here from Princeton and I knew she was good. She worked with me on some of the adaptive optics, and when the Cold war was over, she pulled out all the stops to get the Guide Star declassified so the astronomers could use it. That’s just an anecdotal example. There are probably lots of people who have similar stories to tell.

“I would have had a completely different career without the Cold War.”

Christine: Going back to the origins where you started this, what led you to pursue physics, and more specifically, atomic physics?

Happer: When I came to Princeton, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. During World War Two, I was born in India, and my father was in the British Army, the Air Indian army. When the war broke out, it was only Britain standing up to Japan and the Nazis. My father knew he would be sent to war, and probably to Burma, because the Japanese were coming down from the north. He sent my mother and I back to America. My mother was American. And she was pregnant with my younger brother when we got on the ship. From Bombay, we were lucky we made it across off the coast of South America, trying to keep away from the sub packs. We arrived in 1941 and soon after you know, the Japanese attacked America.

My mother was a single mother, and my uncle was a physicist who had been recruited to work at Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project. My mother was a doctor, and they needed a doctor. Nobody knew what to do about the radiation: radiation sickness, and all the other problems they faced for the first time.

I was a preschooler and in Oak Ridge during the war, and it was exciting. You're surrounded by barbed wire, and we went through several checkpoints with soldiers and machine guns. As a kid, you can imagine that was great. I was surrounded as a preschooler by physicists and chemists and mathematicians. I thought, well, this looks like interesting stuff, if I'm good enough, maybe I'll do physics when I grow up. When I went to UNC I majored in physics at Chapel Hill, and came here, we’ve talked about that. Since I was young at Oak Ridge, I have been interested in nuclear physics. I did my degree in nuclear physics here, at Princeton. I worked on the cyclotron. When I went to Columbia to be a postdoc, I knew all the most modern lore; Various mathematical tricks that had not leaked over into atomic physics, which helped me. So anyway, it was an accident of history that several accidents made me go the way I did.

“Since I was young at Oak Ridge, I have been interested in nuclear physics.”

Ella: Do you have a piece of work or research project that you're most proud of from your time at Princeton?

If you leave aside the classified work, probably the most important work I did was on medical imaging with laser polarized gasses. My group was interested in, you know, nuclei often spinning on their axes. We realized this could be important, and so we were careful to patent it. There was a lot of interest, especially with pulmonologists, people who've read if you've got emphysema. It was a way to finally tell what's going on in your lungs. They get these spectacular pictures and suddenly know what is wrong with the patient, using pulverized helium. We formed a little company to produce this gas, make machines, sell the gas, make the gas, and sell it, and it was successful. It's now part of General Electric, we were the ones who started it. It involved a lot of very interesting basic physics. When you tell the stories, they seem very simple, but in fact, they are enormous problems to solve and mysteries that you must disentangle. I think this was probably the most important, unclassified work that I did. It made me financially independent, so I liked that.

“When you tell the stories, they seem very simple, but in fact, they are enormous problems to solve and mysteries that you must disentangle.”

Christine: I’ve gotten MRIs before, and I know so many people who have, so that’s amazing that you contributed to the modern MRI. You mentioned how you were working with other colleagues; we were curious to know what it was like to work with others in the environment of the Princeton Physics Department?

Well, it changes, new people come, and people retire. When I first came to Princeton, as a student, it still had these wonderful people leftover World War Two and the 30s. For example, Eugene Wagner was a very distinguished Hungarian physicist. Einstein had died, but not long ago. You could feel his ghost here. There were all these famous people, most of them not very active, but nevertheless, it was inspiring to see them because you could read their work, and later realize that this ordinary looking guy who stumbles wrote it. That's all. That's all there is to this guy. And that was helpful because it's true. Success really depends on hard work, and just never giving up and to never stop thinking about important things. There are special geniuses, and it helps to be bright but the brightest people I know never amount to anything compared to the people who are willing to work hard and never give up. Those were the ones who succeeded.

“There are special geniuses, and it helps to be bright but the brightest people I know never amount to anything compared to the people who are willing to work hard and never give up.”

Einstein was like that: not as bright as several his contemporaries, but he just wouldn't give up. He had this fixed idea of symmetry governing the world. It was a very fruitful idea. He made a home run twice, one with special relativity, and then with general relativity, it was all symmetry. The strongest thing in the world is symmetry. Einstein had figured that out a long time before, but you know, if you can make symmetry work for you, then you're way ahead.

Angie: We’ve read the people that you are mentioning in our class, most of those names in our weekly readings, so it’s very interesting to hear about them from your perspective.

Happer: Well, I knew a lot of them, and I felt privileged to know them. I knew they would soon be gone.

Angie: I know you’ve already touched on Oak Ridge and how you spent your childhood there. Did you mother’s experience at Oak Ridge Influence you interest? Obviously, you said that it did, but do you have any specific memories associated with Oak Ridge that you’d like to speak on?

Happer: We built Oakridge in a very short time, just a matter of months. It was a little bit hillbilly town out in East Tennessee, the Cumberland Hills were just on the other side of the Tennessee River from the Smokies. They brought in the Army Corps of Engineers and put-up hundreds of barracks to house people. We lived in barracks, and they built roads out of town for safety, just in case, there were nuclear accidents.

I guess the most impressive thing was not the construction, it was just the amazing group of people that they managed to recruit. They were all a little eccentric, as you would expect for mathematicians and scientists. They were decent people.

Oakridge’s job was to separate uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, and everyone knew that was extremely hard and required an enormous amount of electricity. They had hydroelectric power from the Tennessee River. It was also a secure place. With some of our coastal facilities there was always worry they might be a sensitive target. Oakridge was so far inland; it would have been very hard for anyone to mount an effective attack. When they dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, I must have been five or six years old, but I knew exactly what happened. Most of the adults didn't, but I knew.

We were lucky because the Germans are very talented people. If they had had better leadership, they might have gotten the bomb first. They discovered fission after all. They were leaders in nuclear physics at the time. Their mistake was that they put Heisenberg in charge. Heisenberg was a very good theoretical physicist, but he was a terrible administrator. His worst flaw was he didn't listen to young people. They simply didn't pay any attention to the young people who knew something.

The Germans were convinced that it was impossible to separate uranium, and they thought they had to make plutonium. You must have production reactors and we had most of them on the Columbia River, the desert eastern part of Washington. Our reactors were graphite. That was what Feynman used to make the first reactor at the Chicago stadium, it was a graphite reactor. Graphite is cheap and easy to get, and it was the obvious thing to use.

The Germans thought you couldn't use graphite, and this was Heisenberg's fault, because the young people kept telling him that graphite was fine. The Germans thought that they had to use heavy water. The two best moderators are heavy water (water with deuterium instead of hydrogen) and graphite. Graphite is by far the most practical, but the Germans thought you had to use heavy water. That was well known by 1940. They had to get it in Norway, where the big hydro stations were. He [Heisenberg] had plenty of graphite, but he was too dumb, he really didn't understand how nuclear weapons work.

It's interesting listening to the tapes of him arguing with his underlings, you know, that it's not physically possible. It's very possible. They finally realized that they thought you had to basically have a big unstable reactor, they couldn't believe that you could make something small enough to drop out of an airplane.

You would think a bright theorist like Heisenberg would understand that, but he didn’t. This was a piece of luck for us. The Germans chose Heisenberg, and we chose someone like him in the U.S. the first year of the Manhattan Project. Gregory Breit. from Yale, who was a lot like Heisenberg. Breit was a terrible administrator. We would have had the same experience as the Germans if they hadn't replaced him with Oppenheimer. He had something they didn't, he knew how to identify bright people and use their talents to the maximum. That's a skill. “Opi” had that. I never liked him very much. He was arrogant to young students, which is what I guess I was. Now that I have been hardened by many years of life, I probably should have ignored it. But you're young and you think people are putting you down. All of us students felt the same way. It was a contemptuous office.

“He [Oppenheimer] had something they didn’t, he knew how to identify bright people and use their talents to the maximum.”

Angie: That's interesting. Our course, the seminar that we're taking, it's designed to investigate nuclear physics. A lot of what you're talking about, weapons and power, we talk about that in class a lot.

Our professor is in the anthropology department at Princeton. The other aspect of the seminar focuses on the anthropological side of nuclear weapons. He combines nuclear power with kind Indigenous Studies and our relationship to land. For our final question, what do you know about this intersection of nuclear power and indigenous people and land?

Happer: Well, I'm not sure I'm going to answer your question right. Many people oppose nuclear power. Japan, for example, temporarily closed many their plants after the Fukushima disaster. It's an unforgiving technology, you can't afford any mistakes. If you make a mistake with a coal plant, you ruin the boiler, you're out of business for two or three weeks, and you replace the boiler. This is not a headline in the New York Times and the nightly news. You can't just replace a boiler with a nuclear accident. You must get good people and train them very well, make sure they can handle anything that's likely to happen.

“It’s an unforgiving technology, you can’t afford any mistakes.”

I think we will probably go back to nuclear at some point, but to me, the biggest problem is training. People selecting people, training people, retaining people. That's what bothers me about small modular reactors: the problem has always been getting good people, and now you're going to need more of them, lots more of them. At least with a big reactor you've got three shifts, and the personnel is not so large, but now you multiply that by a factor of 10, or more with smaller reactors.

I think these are solvable problems. For example, the nuclear Navy solved this problem by being incredibly rigorous about training. We've never had an accident on a nuclear sub or a nuclear surface ship because they have such good people. We have very simple designs, idiot proof as far as you can make them idiot proof, with rigorously trained people. I don't like to sit at a bar with them because they're so fixated. I could never, I could never do a job like that, because my mind wanders. Their minds don't wander. People like that are hard to find, and hard to keep. they get tired of it, they go away.

Nuclear power can be made safe. It has enormous advantages. A nuclear plant occupies an acre or two. There may be more land around the plant, just for safety, but it's a very small footprint. They run day and night, they're very reliable. Current reactors, from a physicists’ point of view, are a waste of heat. With a good reactor, you might get 30% of the heat into electricity. Whereas, with a combined cycle gas plant, it's closer to 60%. We just need to get the people that can run them safely.

Then, the deeper question is: is proliferation a risk that we can't take? All of life is a tradeoff. Maybe some risks you should never take. Is nuclear one of these? I don't think so, but I listened to the other side, they have good arguments.

Take Ukraine, now. Ukraine gave up all its nuclear weapons, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and sent them back to Russia. If Ukrainians wanted to [rebuild nuclear arms] they're there, they've got a lot of good nuclear physicists and chemists. They could be a nuclear power and a year. All they would have to do was separate the plutonium from spent fuel, they got a lot of them, easily accessible in Ukraine. They've got reactors that are still in their own hands. and I don't think they would, I don't think they have any intention of doing that, but the possibility is there. A bomb is very hard to assemble because it will pre detonate.

You really can't afford to have an accident. I'm sorry not to have a crisp answer to this, but I think the right thing to do now is to wait a generation or two. There's no urgency to go nuclear. Maybe someone will have some really good ideas between now and then so that we can make even better reactors. The problem is someone must be trying things, you find out what doesn't work, and you eliminate that, pick the most promising from that. Unless you're willing to do experiments and have failures, you really can't get a good system. Since we're not building plants in this country, we're not learning anything now. But other countries may. The Chinese are building a lot of nuclear plants, and I can see they're pretty good, so we can learn from them.

Ella: To finish up, you talked about how a lot of your work was classified and your favorite unclassified piece of work. How much of your work would you say is still classified?

Happer: Well, there's still probably 20 or 30 reports that are still classified that I did for JASON in over two summers. They'll eventually get declassified but it's a slow process. The GuideStar got declassified because of clever Max working so hard on it, otherwise, it would probably still be classified.

Interview with Jessica Lambert

Jessica is a Senior, Princeton Class of 2022, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the Anthropology department. She works closely with the Nuclear Princeton Project and was a T.A. in our freshman seminar.

Christine: What led you to pursue anthropology?

Jessica: I'm Anthro because it's so broad in what you can do. I was in a spot where I wanted to do environmental science and include the social science and natural science side of it. There wasn't really another major, where you could do both. Anthro is so flexible with classes and in the independent work. It’s kind of anything goes to an extent. It has given me a good framework for understanding environmental issues, specifically, how they impact people. I’m not just looking at statistics of what percent of people so and so, but also what does this mean on an individual scale, person to person with lived experiences. That's not necessarily a reason why I chose Anthro, but something that I've been very grateful to have learned through the coursework.

“I’m not just looking at statistics of what percent of people, so and so, but also what does this mean on an individual scale, person to person with lived experiences.”

Ella: On the first day of class, you talked about Oak Ridge, and your familial connection to it. Has that connection influenced your interests at all? And how has it influenced how you think about nuclear energy?

Jessica: Oh, definitely. Well, I didn’t really know about this connection until working on Nuclear Princeton. I was interested in [it] because Ryo gave us a lot of flexibility. We wanted to look at research on nuclear and how it relates to Native people. I knew about Oak Ridge; it’s relatively well known of the different nuclear projects that have gone on in the US. It’s close to my dad’s reservation. I wanted to see if there was anything about the connection between Native people and Oak Ridge. I wasn't really finding anything online. Then I talked to my dad, and I asked, “would you know of anyone who might know about these connections and be able to talk about it?” He's like, “Oh, the book,” I was like, “What book are you talking about?” He's like, “Oh, my grandfather's book.” When I opened it up, it was a cool experience, get[ting] to learn about my family through the research.

At Oak Ridge, there was a Mohawk scientist who worked on nuclear development. When you think about all the stuff that happened in the Navajo Nation, like how a lot of the miners were Navajo people, it can be easy to draw this stark line that nuclear is bad and that it always hurts Native people, which is true in some circumstances. But seeing the economic ties and benefits the local Native people gained, complicates things. My dad’s cousin was writing to a friend in one letter saying, “Oh, Oak Ridge is a wonderful place to work. You get super high wages and housing here for free.” Thinking about how that was beneficial to the tribe, but then at the same time was potentially detrimental to their environmental health and public health because it's a nuclear facility. On top of that, all the other impacts that nuclear weapons had on Native communities.

“It can be easy to draw this stark line that nuclear is bad and that it always hurts Native People…but seeing the economic ties and benefits the local Native people gained, complicates things.”

Anthro allows you to sit in that uncertainty and see that nothing is going to be black and white. You’re able to be critical of things while also acknowledging what beneficial impacts they've had on people. There might not be one path forward or one right direction.

Angie: Regarding the broader context of scientists, doing scientific work and eliminating moral values or choosing to be indifferent towards war and nuclear: what do you think of scientists performing research without thinking of the external consequences of their research and findings?

Jessica: Yeah, that's surprising to me. Because I do a fair amount of geosciences as well. Those professors always seem to be very in tune with social implications. It might just be because a lot of them are doing climate change stuff, so they must think about the implications of their research on society and politics and where it's going to be used. I’m not sure if that's a newer thing, and maybe back when the nuclear bomb was being developed, or even during the Vietnam War, there was less of a connection between science and policy.

For me, it seems very clear, especially when I think about all the people who are doing scientific research on COVID and COVID vaccines. You can't untangle them from social implications. I feel like that's the way that science is often presented, but not necessarily the way that I see it playing out today.

We're very much in a different era. There's a lot more conversations about race and racism. I see that a lot; for example, one of my geo professors’ work is on environmental racism, and making sure that communities have access to science and stuff like that. And so maybe it's just a difference in social climate in general.

Ella: How do you see nuclear Princeton in relation to Princeton's current physics department?

Jessica: I haven't engaged much with the physics department. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab is not technically in Princeton University to my knowledge. It's an affiliate, not under the university. It’s entangled with Princeton in some way. I interviewed one Princeton physicist for Nuclear Princeton. We haven't done a ton of engagement, which is something important to do.

Christine: What do you think about nuclear weapons and power in international conflicts? Should they even have a role in international tensions, or should they be abolished completely? Are they at least important to have for defense purposes?

Angie: How does that also relate to how we view land? Do you think there's a relationship there?

Jessica: Yeah, I don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons. I don't think they do any good. I also am a pacifist, so I just don't think anyone should be fighting in violent ways. It is kind of interesting, the whole argument that we need them. We need to defend ourselves. That's also contingent upon the other party having nuclear weapons. If nobody had them, there wouldn’t be a reason to defend. The question you asked about the intersection between land is good, and I don't necessarily know if I have a great answer. I am still thinking through what it means to vehemently defend lands or a country and not necessarily support all the people in those lands at the same time. It feels hypocritical.

“I am still thinking through what it means to vehemently defend lands or a country and not necessarily support all the people in those lands at the same time. It feels hypocritical.”

Angie: In our interview with Dr. Happer, we were talking about nuclear power in general, not just weapons, also research and development around nuclear power. He said that we need to train good people and have good science, and then seek people who know how to run the technology and won’t misuse it. Do you think nuclear energy is feasible? Could it be a positive technology?

Jessica: I think, for me, the thing that I can't really get over is nuclear energy is touted as this clean energy, you know, burns cleanly, it's great for the environment. If you think about where you get that uranium and the processing of it, you know, that emits carbon, and it puts a lot of people at risk, primarily native communities. Then there’s the question of the storage of all this waste. I feel like it's easy to look at the facility as an isolated unit, but you can't think of it that way because it's not. The facility wouldn't exist if you didn't have mining for uranium, exploiting native communities and contaminating native lands. It also wouldn't exist without the issue of what do we do with all this waste, because the US just doesn't have an answer. We saw what happened with Yucca Mountain, which is on native lands, and luckily never came to fruition, but there's just isn't a good solution for what to do with nuclear waste.

Ella: What kind of impact do you hope to have at Princeton and post-graduation?

Jessica: I'm going to be working in environmental policy in Washington, D.C. I hope to do a lot of stuff that's very centered on Native people. When it comes to environmental contamination of native lands, I feel like there's discussion about how climate change affects Native people, but less so on the dumping of toxic waste on native lands. I think working on these issues would be important and meaningful, which is related to what my senior thesis is on.

I want to hopefully get funding and resources to tribes to either do environmental testing for remediation purposes or implementing Tribal Environmental Protection Agencies. Tribes are sovereign nations so they can implement stricter environmental regulations on their lands. In a lot of ways, the EPA standards are based on political conversations rather than public health and involves a lot of lobbying from companies that emit toxins. To make sure that tribes have the authority and power and money to be able to protect their lands adequately, would be important and meaningful work. So hopefully, I'll get to work on that.

“[I want] to make sure that tribes have the authority and power and money to be able to protect their lands adequately.”

Angie: Why do you think this is so difficult for people to grasp the relationship between nuclear power and the impacts on indigenous communities? Do you think it's not hard at all, just a matter of ignorance, or is it really that complex?

Jessica: I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that these conversations are being had. It’s something that isn't talked about a lot, which is part of the reason why the Nuclear Princeton project is so important. We like to think about specific issues as like isolated entities and not tracing how, what impacts they have beyond, their immediate vicinity. Something that Anthro does well is that it trains you to see tendrils of the ways that social phenomena, facilities, research projects, or anything that impacts communities and people.

I don't think it's necessarily something that's inherently difficult to understand. I think it's just not the way that we're trained to think. It takes a little bit of adjusting to say nuclear development can be directly related to the destruction of native lands. It just takes a little bit of adjustment, I think.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily something that’s inherently difficult to understand. I think it’s just not the way that we’re trained to think.”

Christine: To finish up, I was wondering if you think that an individual can be kind of separated from their actions and the impact that they had?

Jessica: The way that we're taught is to not think about those broader impacts. I think it's important to not claim that a person ignorant, therefore they didn't do anything wrong, because it was still scientific research that could harm people. This comes back to the idea that nothing is black and white. I think you can simultaneously work to hold people accountable, while also acknowledging that it's not necessarily their fault. You cannot just say that because they didn't have mal intent that research did not devastatingly impact people at the same time.

Interview Reflections

Both Interviews that we conducted as a group were very interesting and provided a productive comparison between an indigenous student and a long time Princeton physics professor, who has specific ties to nuclear physics.

The interview with Dr. Happer allowed me to place aside my initial expectations. His childhood at Oakridge, his experiences in the world of elite physicists, and the factors that led him to make certain career decisions, demonstrated that he was a very intricate person, with great insight on nuclear physics, power, and weapons. This phenomenon, of diving deeper into an individual’s history, especially a renowned figure like William Happer, and discovering how much of a story they have to tell, is quite beautiful. No matter if a person has a complicated past, they still have a story to tell, and a life they once lived, filled with memories of moments, and connections to people and places. Happer had a lot to say, about nuclear weapons, about Oak Ridge, and about Oppenheimer, (the administrator of the Manhattan Project, and the movie that is currently being filmed on the campus of Princeton), but the biggest takeaway, in my opinion, was his character. He spoke with grace, and exemplified intellectual brightness, past our initial expectations of a complicated career path. This trend follows with the main idea of our freshman seminar, knowing that each moment and place, specifically our land, has its own history, with intricate details tied to specific location and persons.

Jessica’s interview added another layer to the discussion of land intersection with nuclear weapons. Her experience as an anthropology major, and perspective of the nuclear Princeton research allowed for well-constructed answers to important questions. Reading through both interviews, it is clear that individual perspective, and education on land and indigenous peoples is an aspect of nuclear weapons and power that must be talked about more often.