The US is on the cusp of a nuclear renaissance. One problem: Americans are terrified of waste

BUCHANAN, New York
CNN
—

The Indian Point nuclear power plant was an energy giant for fifty years, generating a quarter of the electricity that powered New York City’s iconic, glowing skyline.

It’s already well into the dismantling process after its 2021 closure: The remaining waste of the radioactive fuel that once generated all that energy is locked in more than 120 hulking metal and concrete canisters.

The huge containers are welded shut and lined up behind barbed wire fences, watched 24/7 by guards with long guns.

This is one of the many misconceptions about nuclear energy: America’s nuclear waste is not buried in a mountain or hidden at the bottom of a deep, rocky cave. It is sealed in coffin-like barrels and distributed to more than 50 locations across the country.

Most other countries with long-standing nuclear energy programs have plans to create a permanent home for these used fuel bottles. The US doesn’t. Congress’ decades-old idea to bury them deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is long dead, and an alternative has never been found.

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That’s almost entirely because Americans are generally opposed to living near nuclear waste, and are suspicious of governments’ and utilities’ efforts to allay fears about nuclear power. The byproduct of nuclear energy is still associated with atomic bombs or nuclear meltdowns. In reality, what comes out of reactors is far from the dangerous, radioactive sludge we see in movies or conjure up in our imaginations.

People “imagined it looked like the green barrels full of slime that Homer Simpson has,” said Paul Murray, the US Energy Department’s deputy assistant secretary for nuclear waste. The spent fuel — metal rods containing uranium pellets — are “annoyingly safe” if properly sealed, Murray said.

The waste from nuclear energy poses so little danger that someone would have to stand close to it for an entire year to be exposed to as much radiation “as maybe one or two X-rays,” says Brian Vangor, Indiana’s waste disposal supervisor. Point.

But the perception of danger is a hurdle that is quickly becoming one of the country’s biggest obstacles to uploading an abundance of climate-friendly energy to the grid.

Nuclear start-ups – including one from Bill Gates – are investing billions of dollars in the new wave reactor technology. Two massive reactors recently came online in Georgia, and a burst of AI activity has tech giants scrambling to revive plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – the site of America’s infamous nuclear meltdown.

On the cusp of America’s nuclear energy renaissance, federal officials are pleading with communities to say yes to spent fuel storage. No state has yet raised its hand to store the country’s nuclear waste, despite the lucrative deals it could bring. Not even temporarily.

Holtec, for example, the company that now owns the decommissioned Indian Point, is eyeing a site in New Mexico to store its spent fuel.

Officials in New Mexico — where the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bombs without telling the surrounding communities what was happening — reject the idea outright.

“Just because we have the right geology, low population density and a large landmass does not mean we agree to be a further sacrifice zone for the nation’s defense industry or even the energy industry,” said James Kenney, Secretary of New Mexico’s Environment. Department.

Other Western countries that went all-in on nuclear power – including Finland, Sweden and Canada – have for years offered sweet deals to communities to house permanent repositories, either in the form of cash or investments in new medical facilities, libraries, community centers or other public buildings.

The US took a more hasty approach. Congress’s decision in the late 1980s to bury the nation’s nuclear waste deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was made largely without consultation with Nevada state officials, let alone residents.

“The US followed the decide-announce-defend model, which is clearly a failure,” said Allison McFarlane, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who wrote a book about the Yucca Mountain saga.

The decision led to a storm of reactions. State leaders called it the “Nevada Act” and fought it tooth and nail. Some scientists and state officials were concerned about Yucca’s history of seismic activity and feared the repository could become more exposed to free oxygen, increasing the chance of radiation leaks.

Congress’ telling, not asking, hardened opposition in a state that had no nuclear power plants and whose desert was the site of more than 900 Cold War nuclear bomb tests.

That, combined with the fear of shipping nuclear waste through Las Vegas — the state’s economic engine and the nation’s party capital — sealed Yucca’s fate. It was Nevada’s Harry Reid who put the final nail in Yucca’s coffin when he became Senate majority leader.

Murray, a soft-spoken British resident who has been working on nuclear energy for decades, is on a mission to make waste less scary.

His first challenge is to address public concerns about transporting nuclear waste to a possible temporary storage site – a location that has yet to be determined. Murray’s office will embark on a mission next year to put the fuel storage containers through a very creative – and very public – stress test, using whichever scenario people fear most.

“We want to take a package, we want to crash a train into it, drop it on a hard surface, drive it into an abutment, set it on fire, drop it in a lake and fish it out,” Murray said. “Do they want us to throw turkeys or chickens at it?” They will.

This series of achievements has one goal: to show, not tell, that spent fuel is safe. Many other countries – France, Britain, Japan – regularly transport their spent fuel casks by train, boat or even trucks.

The other big item on Murray’s list is looking for states to raise their hands to temporarily house the nation’s spent fuel.

“We can basically make any state that comes forward work,” Murray said.

States have so far been staunchly opposed to making this work.

Leaders in Texas are opposed to their state being a stopgap solution, and a case over the future of nuclear waste storage in both Texas and neighboring New Mexico is heading to the Supreme Court.

New Mexico recently passed a ban on nuclear waste storage to prevent Holtec, which owns several other nuclear power plants in addition to Indian Point, from completing a storage site there.

Kenney, the state’s environment secretary, said his opposition is standing up for people who have experienced health problems while working in the state’s uranium mines or living near the waste those mines produced.

Even efforts to clean up old uranium mine waste in New Mexico have proven controversial. High school students in Thoreau, New Mexico, protested an EPA plan to do just that, as the agency proposed storing the waste in their town.

“Historically, the government has not treated Navajos and Native Americans well,” Thoreau high school student Ezekiel Gonzales told CNN. “We cannot trust our government because of what they have done to us. That makes me angry, and I’m pretty sure it makes everyone in my town angry too.”

Taxpayers have already paid $47 billion in storage costs for all the homeless nuclear waste, and that price tag will continue to rise until the feds can find a permanent solution.

“The longer we wait to move, the more they will have to pay,” said Frank Rusco, director of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which focuses on energy.

That’s why some experts argue for a different solution, albeit a politically more difficult one: recycling. France has been doing it for years, converting used plutonium into a product that can be used again in reactors and generate more energy.

America’s massive 94,000 tons of spent fuel stockpile is a waste of money, some experts say.

“It doesn’t have to be just a one-time process,” says Greg Piefer, the founder and CEO of Shine Technologies, a nuclear fusion company exploring reprocessing. “Every time you burn it, you can generate more plutonium, and then you burn that plutonium again.”

But first the country would have to build a facility to actually recycle and reuse waste — and building one would be expensive.

And as with Yucca Mountain, Congress should change an existing law intended to discourage gun proliferation.

It is a nuclear option worth exploring as costs to taxpayers and energy demand soar. Some lawmakers agree on that.

“Reprocessing should be part of the debate and discussion, understanding how expensive it is,” Democratic Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico told CNN. “If something goes into the ground, it should be as small as possible.”