Students Visit Nine-Mile Nuclear Facility for “Responding to Proliferation” course with Professor deNevers

Professor deNevers and host Bob Pellegrino (right) pose with students inside a simulator used for training reactor operators on visit to Nine-Mile Point Nuclear Facility

Responding to Proliferation – Field Visit to Nine-Mile Point Nuclear Facility

Several students visited the Nine-Mile Point Nuclear Facility on Thursday,. March 22 as part of the “Responding to Proliferation” course taught by Professor Renee deNevers.

The course considers different strategies to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  Keys part of that task are to understand what is happening with legitimate uses of nuclear power (energy), and to prevent illicit efforts to produce the fissile material required to build nuclear weapons.  We spoke with a representative of Nine Mile Point earlier in the year about the nuclear fuel cycle, as part of our investigation in to ways that legal use of nuclear energy could contribute to proliferation.  The visit to the plant was a way to gain a better understanding of nuclear power, as well as the efforts nuclear power plant operators make to ensure the safety of their operations.

The group that visited the plant included both students in Professor deNevers course and Ph. D. students from the political science department.  (Only a few are pictured in the the photo).

More about Professor Renee deNevers 

Renée de Nevers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs at The Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Previously she taught at the University of Oklahoma, and was a Program Officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has been a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Hoover Institution, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Russia in 2011. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her current research focuses on great power efforts to protect or manipulate sovereignty when confronted by new security challenges, and the regulation and accountability of private military and security companies.  She is the author of Comrades No More: The Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe and the co-author of Combating Terrorism: Strategies and Approaches, and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Publications

Selected Publications

“Sovereignty at Sea: States and Security in the Maritime Domain” (Security Studies, November-December, 2015).

“State Interests and the Problem of Piracy: Comparing US and UK Approaches to Maritime PMSCs” (Ocean Development and International Law, May 2015).

“Private Security’s Role in Shaping Foreign Policy,” in Anna Leander and Rita Abrahamsen, eds., Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies(Routledge,  2015).

“Military Contractors and the American Way of War” (with Deborah Avant) (Daedalus 140 (3), Summer 2011); also in David M. Kennedy, ed. The Modern American Military (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

The Effectiveness of Self-Regulation for the Private Security Industry (Journal of Public Policy, Vol.30, No. 2, 2010).

“Private Security Companies and the Laws of War” (Security Dialogue, April 2009).

“(Self) Regulating War? Voluntary Regulation and the Private Security Industry (Security Studies, Fall 2009).

Combating Terrorism, William C. Banks, Renée de Nevers, and Mitchel Wallerstein (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008).

“NATO’s International Security Role in the Terrorist Era” (International Security, Spring 2007)

“Imposing International Norms: Great Powers and Norm Enforcement” (International Studies Review, Spring 2007).

Comrades No More: The Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Research Interests

International security, international relations, private military and security companies