Forum Events & Reports
Click the links below to learn more about each forum event and explore preliminary results.
We are excited to hit the road again to host public forums in May and June of 2025 across Arizona. 3CAZ’s public forums are day-long discussions where people throughout Arizona are guided through facilitated activities to share their perspectives on nuclear waste management. Our goal is to inform the United States Department of Energy’s process for deciding where to build storage facilities for nuclear waste that’s fair and community-driven. Importantly, there are no current plans to site a nuclear waste facility in Arizona. Read on to learn why we are holding forums throughout communities in Arizona, what the forums are all about, and where they are taking place. Visit cspo.org/areas-of-focus/pta/ to learn more about our forum approach.
Why Are We Holding Public Forums?
We are holding forums to help inform how the US Department of Energy (or DOE) and communities can work together to manage the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, a type of radioactive waste generated at nuclear power plants. Currently, spent nuclear fuel is stored at nuclear power plants across the US. The US federal government is obligated by law to manage this spent nuclear fuel and remove it from power plants and ultimately dispose of it. While a plan for permanent disposal is created, the DOE is looking into building one or two consolidated interim (or temporary) storage facilities. These interim facilities would save taxpayers’ dollars, allow the federal government to meet its responsibilities, and remove the waste from communities who never agreed to store it for long periods of time.
The Department of Energy plans to use a collaborative approach to decide where to build these storage facilities. A collaborative process for deciding where to build a facility prioritizes the participation and needs of people and communities. This process would seek a community’s willing and informed involvement in accepting to build this facility. In a collaborative process, multiple communities would volunteer and negotiate with the federal government to host an interim storage facility.
Our forums are meant to do two things: 1) Inform how this collaborative process will unfold and 2) Build engagement tools that any community who expresses interest in hosting a storage facility could use to inform their decision and involve everyone from their community.
What Are Public Forums?
Forums are day-long events where people from all walks of life share their perspectives through facilitated discussion activities. These activities are designed to provide everyone in attendance baseline information about the topic while encouraging open dialogue and sharing. The 3CAZ team has developed forums for many topics like asteroid deflection, human genome editing, automated vehicles, climate resilience and more.
The 3CAZ forums are split into 4 sessions:
- Framing the Problem & Understanding the Issue
- Your Community Values
- Priorities for Collaboration
- Who Should be Involved from a Community?
Each session starts with an informative video to get the conversation started. This is followed by small group discussions with engaging hands-on materials. Attendees complete individual response sheets and group response posters to document their perspectives.
Group response posters for each of the four sessions of the 3CAZ forum.
Where Are Forums Taking Place?
These forums are not about finding or selecting a host for a consolidated interim storage facility for nuclear waste, and we are not volunteering Arizona as a place to store nuclear waste. We chose five different locations across Arizona to make sure we are hearing from people who live in different areas (urban, rural) and who hold different perspectives. We are excited to partner with libraries, museums, community centers and universities across Arizona to host forums in:
- Parker, AZ: May 17, 2025
- Flagstaff, AZ: May 31, 2025
- Yuma, AZ: June 7, 2025
- Phoenix, AZ (Youth): June 14 & 15, 2025
- Phoenix, AZ: June 21, 2025
- Sahuarita, AZ: June 28, 2025
To learn more about each forum or to apply to attend one, click on the links above.
The map to the right shows where each forum is being held (green circles) along with the locations of smaller community dialogues (blue circles) hosted in 2024. We used the community dialogues to inform our forum activities
What Will Happen After the Public Forums?
After each forum, the 3CAZ team will work to develop a preliminary summary of the results to share with participants. The summary will cover some of the key priorities, people, and values discussed at each location. We’ll post those for anyone to review here as well.
In Spring 2026, the 3CAZ team will release a full report on all of the forum discussions that took place across Arizona. This will include data from each question posed at the forum to paint a more complete picture of what the communities of Arizona found most important in a collaborative based process. This report will be posted here on our website and shared with experts, stakeholders, and the Department of Energy to inform a collaborative process for nuclear waste storage.
Want to Stay Updated?
Keep an eye on our blog for updates about each forum, leave your email on our contact us page to receive occasional emails about the project, or use the contact us page to send us questions.
