The Trump administration wants to quadruple America’s production of nuclear power over the next 25 years and is hoping to entice states to take the nuclear waste those plants produce by dangling the promise of steering massive investments their way, POLITICO reports.
President Donald Trump’s big bet on amping up nuclear production is not an easy feat, fraught with NIMBY concerns
about safety and waste byproducts. The administration hopes to solve at least one of those issues — what to do with toxic nuclear waste — with a program they plan to roll out this week.
Governors would effectively be invited to compete for what the administration believes is a once-in-a-generation economic development prize in exchange for hosting the nation’s most politically and environmentally toxic byproduct.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has already begun laying groundwork with governors. Over the last two weeks, Wright has met with at least two governors who have expressed interest, according to two officials familiar with the private meetings granted anonymity to discuss them.
The administration sees the plan as a cornerstone of its broader nuclear agenda,
which seeks to incentivize more nuclear production through speedier permitting, among other changes. The administration sees increased nuclear capacity as vital to the need to dramatically increase electricity generation as demand climbs, driven in part by data centers and AI-related power needs.
One of the officials familiar with the planning said the administration intends to steer “billions, if not hundreds of billions”
in related nuclear infrastructure and supply-chain development from fuel production and research to reprocessing and advanced manufacturing as part of a broader push to build out a domestic nuclear fuel cycle that can support rapid expansion of reactor construction.
The administration hopes that high-flying promise will help flip the politics that have paralyzed the nuclear industry for decades. But experts say it won’t be
that simple.
Lake Barrett, who previously ran the Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Nuclear Waste Management, and Allison MacFarlane, former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission — along with other nuclear experts — put forward their own set of recommendations last week to address the problem.
“While the U.S. has safely
stored spent nuclear fuel at reactor sites for decades, such storage is a temporary measure and spent fuel must be moved from the more than 76 interim surface storage sites to one or more deep geologic repositories for final disposal,” Barrett and MacFarlane said in a statement.
The Trump administration’s nuclear waste initiative is expected to be unveiled as a request for information laying out what the federal government
is willing to help facilitate (and what it wants in return) as it looks for states willing to take spent nuclear fuel. It was a DOGE initiative led by Adam Blake and Seth Cohen that was first pitched in June of last year and has overcome some internal pushback from within the Department of Energy. It was ultimately approved by the White House at the end of last year.
The U.S. has struggled for generations to answer a basic
question: What do you do with the spent fuel piling up at reactor sites around the country, typically in steel-and-concrete casks intended for interim storage?
The government’s long-running plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada never came to fruition, an episode that cemented nuclear waste as an intractable problem for for governors and lawmakers wary of being labeled a dumping ground.
Since then, the federal government has repeatedly fallen short of its statutory obligation to take possession of commercial spent fuel, triggering years of litigation and costly settlements.
The Energy Department has sought since the first Trump administration to implement a “consent based siting” program for states to host interim storage facilities. That process was designed
to attract states that were interested in building those facilities — and avoid states where public pushback had made such developments politically unpopular. But so far, it has failed to build any facilities.
Under the new plan, the administration is aiming to link the waste problem to something governors actually want: industrial projects, capital investment along with high-paying jobs. Essentially, the administration is
pitching a vision in which states that volunteer could become hubs not just for storage, but for multiple stages of the nuclear supply chain, from processing and fuel work to research and development that’s tied to next-generation reactors.
Some of the “obvious contenders,” the first official said, are states that already marketing themselves as nuclear centers. Tennessee, home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a large
nuclear workforce, and Utah, which has courted advanced reactor companies and testing activity, were cited as states likely to be receptive.
The official said at least one other state has also privately indicated interest but declined to identify which.
Read the full article from POLITICO here.
