The Biden administration, the incoming Trump administration, nearly all of Congress, the big tech companies and even many environmental groups agree on one thing: It’s time for new nuclear power in the United States.
There’s just one pretty major obstacle nobody wants to touch: what to do about all of the spent fuel waste.
Since the poisonous 20-year fight over the idea of storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain ended in 2011 with the Obama White House calling the idea quits, members of Congress have avoided the issue.
There’s been little incentive to solve the problem. The United States has had barely any new nuclear come online for decades.
The industry as a whole is in stagnation in the U.S. Plus, the federal government has assumed both safety and financial responsibility for dealing with the existing waste, so there’s been little reason for companies to think about the issue.
“There’s no incentive for anybody to do absolutely anything on this,” said David Brown, the senior vice president for government affairs at Constellation, at a Heritage Foundation event. Constellation plans to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island and sell all of the energy it creates to Microsoft. “Nobody is accountable. Nobody sees the pain around that.”
But the time for this kind of procrastination has ended, said Richard Meserve, a former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The problem of what to do with nuclear waste will become pressing if the Trump administration follows through on the kinds of expansions he and Republicans in Congress have called for. And the issue is so huge and politically toxic, the answers will not come quickly or easily.
“It’s in no one’s particular interest to actually take any action on this right now,” Meserve said. “But if nuclear gets out and starts to really be real as a solution, in the sense that it’s more than just something that people are talking about, the Googles and Microsofts and all of those companies, they won’t want to be left with this as a problem hanging over their heads.”
Several states have passed laws restricting any new nuclear power plants from being built until the waste-storage problem has a solution, including California.
In July, Congress passed bipartisan legislation to reform the nuclear industry and provide support for advanced reactors. The Department of Energy is providing financial and technical help for decommissioned power plants to come back online. Microsoft, Meta and Google are among the major tech companies that have made recent commitments to support the development of new reactors.
But none of that progress changes the fact that the waste from nuclear reactors is currently stored in casks on site, next to the active or decommissioned power plants. Until interim or long-term storage facilities are chosen, the communities housing new power plant builds will also have to agree that waste can be stored there too.
“The new administration is talking about increasing nuclear production. I think you have to couple that with a plan for nuclear waste that will actually make sense,” said California Democratic Rep. Mike Levin, who co-leads the bipartisan Spent Nuclear Fuels Solutions Caucus. “Particularly for those who want to support the administration’s objectives to increase nuclear energy, I think it would be fully irresponsible to do that without fixing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.”
The federal government is required by law to manage the storage of spent nuclear fuel. Because the White House gave up on trying to make Yucca Mountain the storage site, the government is constantly violating those legal requirements, and it has lost many lawsuits against the utilities that manage nuclear power plants as a result.
So now, decades after the Department of Energy was supposed to start managing the fuel, the government instead spends nearly $1 billion each year paying companies to keep the fuel on site.
“They were supposed to begin moving fuel on Jan. 31, 1998, and nothing’s happened, and we’re no closer today. We may be even further away than we were in 1998 when that happened,” Brown said. “For those of us who have reactors, that material is being safely managed on-site at relatively little or no cost because the federal government is largely reimbursing us for their failure to execute.”
As an added bonus for the companies, utilities like Brown’s Constellation are no longer contributing to the Nuclear Waste Fund that was designed to pay for the long-term storage facility. Just as the DOE has to pay the utilities for its failure to store the waste, the government also cannot keep collecting money for the creation of a facility that has no prospect of existing.
Doing anything different would require Congress or the White House to come up with an alternative medium or long-term storage solution.
“We’re not actually constrained by technology. We’re constrained by politics,” said Alex Flint, the executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions and a former leader at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “There are wiser ways of dealing with nuclear waste, but what we’re doing actually turns out to be acceptable.”
A few members of Congress have made motions toward the problem. On Friday, Rep. Bob Latta and Rep. Scott Peters introduced a bill that might make it possible to recycle some spent fuel into usable supply, a process that’s basically impossible under current U.S. policy. While that proposal isn’t a solution in and of itself, it would create financial value for the waste, help address fuel supply chain concerns and also reduce the total amount. Peters, Levin and Rep. August Pfluger also sponsored a bill introduced in September that would create a government agency solely devoted to dealing with the waste issue. The agency would be funded by the interest from the Nuclear Waste Fund’s reserves.
Nuclear waste is a key issue for Levin, who, like Peters, represents people living around the decommissioned San Onofre generating station, where spent nuclear fuel is still stored despite the plant’s closure in 2012. “It’s around 28 states that have the spent fuel on-site, and it’s just not the safest or smartest way to do this,” Levin said.
Levin helped secure the funding for the DOE to try to find sites for interim waste storage through a process called “consent-based siting,” where a state or tribal nation approves a facility. Whether that process will work depends on who you ask: Brown was skeptical when asked about its viability, and Peters’ office believes there should be a backup plan if consent-based siting does not play out successfully.
“Whether or not consent-based siting continues to exist in its current form, there has to be some sort of consent from not only the community but the state and or tribal nation that might be potentially involved in this,” said Andrew Smith, a representative for the American Nuclear Society, who works on a DOE-funded consent-based siting consortium. Smith believes this system, which Finland, Sweden, Canada and France are all implementing in different ways, could work.
Levin agrees, and he said that he hopes that the incoming Trump administration doesn’t upend the progress already made.
“Getting consent in those countries is what’s led to success. It’s the opposite of the United States, where Yucca Mountain didn’t really have the consent of Nevadans,” he said. “I wish it had been started many years before, that we hadn’t lost so much time trying to force one state or another to do something without consent.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.