Arjun Makhijani

Professional experience

Arjun Makhijani is an electrical and nuclear engineer with 37 years' experience in energy and nuclear issues. He is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. IEER has been doing nuclear-related studies for twenty years and is an independent non-profit organization located in Takoma Park, Maryland. Makhijani has a Ph.D. (Engineering), from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in the application of plasma physics to controlled nuclear fusion.

Makhijani has extensive professional experience and is qualified in radioactive waste disposal, standards for protection of human health from radiation, and the relative costs and benefits of nuclear energy and other energy sources. He has testified before Congress and has served as a consultant on energy issues to utilities and other organizations, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Lower Colorado River Authority, the Edison Electric Institute, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and several agencies of the United Nations. He has also served as an expert witness in Nuclear Regulatory Commission proceedings on nuclear facilities and in numerous lawsuits and has testified on a variety of issues including releases of radioactivity from nuclear facilities. He has testified before Congress on several occasions regarding issues related to nuclear waste, reprocessing, environmental releases of radioactivity, and regulation of nuclear weapons plants.

Makhijani has studied the French reprocessing and nuclear energy system and was the director of a team that analyzed ANDRA’s plans for a geological repository for high level radioactive waste in France on behalf of a French government-sponsored stakeholder committee (2004).

Publications

Arjun Makhijani has written a number of books and other publications analyzing the safety, economics, and efficiency of various energy sources, including nuclear power and renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar energy. He was the principal author of the first evaluation of energy end-uses and energy efficiency potential in the U.S. economy (published by the Electronics Research Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley in 1971). He was also the principal author of the first overview study on Energy and Agriculture in the Third World (Ballinger 1975). He was one of the principal technical staff of the Ford Foundation Energy Policy Project, and a co-author of its final report, A Time to Choose, which helped shape U.S. energy policy during the mid-to-late 1970s. He is a co-author of Investment Planning in the Electricity Sector, published by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1976. He is also the principal author of Nuclear Power Deception (Apex Books 1999), an analysis of the costs of nuclear power in the United States and a co-author and principal editor of the first global assessment of the health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons production (Nuclear Wastelands, 1995 and 2000), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by MIT Press. Most recently, Makhijani has authored Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free (RDR Books and IEER Press 2007), the first analysis of a transition to a U.S. economy based completely on renewable energy, without any use of fossil fuels or nuclear power. He has many published articles in journals such as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and The Progressive, as well as in newspapers, including the Washington Post. Arjun Makhijani has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, NPR, CNN, and BBC, among others.

Awards

In 1989, Dr Makhijani received The John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism of the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, with Robert Alvarez; was awarded the Josephine Butler Nuclear Free Future Award in 2001; the 2007/2008 Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy by the Tides Foundation; and was named a Ploughshares Hero, by the Ploughshares Fund (2006). In 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.