Abstract
Environmental and energy justice implications of nuclear technologies, particularly at early stages of research and development, are often considered an afterthought to be dealt with later in technology deployment and use. Avoidable consequences on vulnerable communities are thus missed, leaving them to reap disproportionate burdens of these nuclear technologies. Currently, nuclear engineers and researchers lack the education and tools needed to readily consider justice in their work. The Justice Underpinning Science and Technology Research (JUST-R) metrics framework developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory seeks to provide researchers with a framework to consider the distributional, recognition, procedural, and cosmopolitan justice implications of their work at early stages. Yet JUST-R does not consider restorative justice, a particularly relevant justice concept for nuclear engineering, which is informed by a technology’s historical context. This work dilates the JUST-R framework to include restorative justice metrics and applies it to a pilot case study in the University of New Mexico’s (UNM) nuclear engineering program. Given the rich history of the nuclear industry in the state of New Mexico, UNM is embedded in a diverse ecosystem of nuclear-focused national laboratories, mining companies, and defense institutions. The results of this study fill existing gaps in the JUST-R framework to make it more relevant to nuclear engineering. This study further provides insight into how the process of conducting scientific research can be transformed to prioritize the minimization of harm to frontline communities and highlights the potential benefits of embedding justice in nuclear engineering curricula.