Five states have agreed to accept nuclear waste from around the country in exchange for federal help developing nuclear energy to create thousands of jobs. Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Utah and Idaho are all run by Republican governors, and they’re lining up to host the leftovers of a system that keeps producing poison while promising prosperity.
Who Pays for the Deal
The states say they welcome the chance to help America reclaim its leadership in civilian nuclear energy. What that means in practice is simple enough: spent fuel is currently stored at nuclear plants and former nuclear sites nationwide and is piling up. The waste doesn’t vanish. It sits there, waiting, while officials and industry figures talk about growth, leadership and renaissance.
If built, the storage sites would mark significant progress in a multi-decade effort to store more than 95,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. Plans for a permanent underground storage facility at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have long been stalled because of staunch opposition from most residents and officials. That resistance has not ended the problem. It has only pushed the burden around.
New storage sites would move the radioactive material away from population centers, fault lines and flood plains. Experts say the plan also should help officials gain consent from communities that will host the repositories. Consent, in this setup, is the word used when communities are asked to absorb risks created elsewhere.
What the Campuses Would Hold
Under the non-binding agreements, the states could host Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses that would include waste sites as well as uranium enrichment, spent-fuel reprocessing and fuel fabrication. The campuses may also host advanced reactor deployment, power generation and data centers, the Energy Department said.
The pitch comes with a price tag and a promise. The campuses have the potential to attract up to $50 billion in private investment and generate as much as $10 billion in state and local tax revenues, the Energy Department said in a statement. Eligible projects could access federal loans worth billions of dollars, the department said. The money flows upward first. The risks stay local.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement, “These campuses will be massive generators of economic growth ... and be crucial to unleashing America’s nuclear renaissance,” and called the proposed campuses an “innovative concept” that will “get America’s nuclear industry growing again.” That’s the language of the apparatus: growth, renaissance, innovation. The waste, the exposure and the long-term storage fight sit underneath it.
Tennessee is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which enriched uranium during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, while Idaho hosts the Idaho National Laboratory, a key research site for nuclear energy and national security. Utah was a source of raw uranium for the Manhattan Project and a training site for crews that dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The same places once fed war production. Now they’re being asked to carry another round of nuclear burden.
The Push From Above
The announcement comes as President Donald Trump attempts to quadruple domestic nuclear energy production because of surging electricity demand due to a data center and artificial intelligence boom. Trump also has moved to reshape the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up nuclear reactor development. Under Trump's direction, the commission has proposed eliminating a foundational safety principle that for 50 years minimized the radiation people in the United States are exposed to.
The NRC proposal would abandon a philosophy to keep radiation exposure “as low as reasonably achievable,” instead setting a separate standard on maximum radiation exposure that includes several actions facilities must take depending on the potential dose of radiation to workers. The old rule at least pretended caution. The new one sounds like a managed downgrade.
California Rep. Mike Levin said the nuclear fuel announcement was a long time coming and required bipartisan collaboration to fix difficult nuclear waste challenges. Levin, a Democrat, has pushed to allocate funding to safely remove and dispose of spent nuclear fuel from decommissioned nuclear plants, including the closed San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California. He said in a statement, “Today’s selection of states is a monumental step in the right direction.” He added, “For the first time in decades, states are raising their hands” to accept nuclear waste.
Scott Roecker, a former official at the National Nuclear Security Administration who now advises the Nuclear Scaling Initiative, a pro-nuclear group, said the campuses are a good idea, though he cautions that spent nuclear fuel should not be reprocessed there to be recycled for new fuel because of the cost and security issues. Roecker said, “Getting a community to accept a long-term repository for nuclear waste has been a big challenge in the United States politically. It’s been a hard pill to swallow for certain communities.” He added, “The fact that they’re talking about sort of the whole fuel cycle at these centers is a positive thing. Basically, you’re getting the consent of that community for that long-term repository.”
Congress now must work to authorize the campuses and establish clear oversight, Levin said. The same institutions that created the mess now get to write the rules for cleaning it up, while communities are told to call that progress.