Wanted: Volunteers to host nuclear waste, forever

LONDON/WASHINGTON - The Trump administration’s plan to unleash a wave of small futuristic nuclear reactors to power the AI era is falling back on an age-old strategy to dispose of the highly toxic waste: bury it at the bottom of a very deep hole.

But there’s a problem. There is no very deep hole, and the stockpile of some 100,000 tonnes of radioactive waste being stored temporarily at nuclear plants and other sites across the US keeps getting bigger.

To resolve this quandary, the US administration is now dangling a radioactive carrot.

States are being asked to volunteer to host a permanent geological repository for spent fuel as part of a campus of facilities including new nuclear reactors, waste reprocessing, uranium enrichment and data centres, according to a proposal published by the Department of Energy (DOE) last week.

Its request for information (RFI) marks a big shift in policy. The plan to boost nuclear energy is now combined with a requirement to find a permanent home for waste and puts decisions in the hands of local communities - decisions worth tens of billions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs, according to a spokesperson for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.

“By combining this all together in a package, it’s a matter of big carrots being placed alongside a waste facility which is less desirable,” said Mr Lake Barrett, a former official at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the DOE. States including Utah and Tennessee have already expressed interest in nuclear energy investments, he said.

The nuclear office said the request had generated interest but did not comment on individual states, which have 60 days to respond. Officials in Utah and Tennessee did not respond to requests for comment.

President Donald Trump wants to quadruple US nuclear power capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050 as electricity demand surges for the first time in decades thanks to the boom in data centres driving artificial intelligence and the electrification of transport.

In 2025, the DOE picked 11 new advanced nuclear test reactor designs for fast-track licensing and aims to have three pilots built by July 4 this year.

However, public acceptance of nuclear energy hinges partly on the promise of burying nuclear waste deep underground, according to studies by the US and British governments as well as the European Commission.

“A complete nuclear strategy must include safe, durable pathways for final disposition, and that remains a required element of the RFI,” the Office of Nuclear Energy spokesperson said.

Previous efforts to find a solution have run into strong local opposition.

The DOE started looking for a permanent waste facility in 1983 and settled on Nevada’s Yucca Mountain in 1987. But former president Barack Obama halted funding in 2010 due to opposition from Nevada lawmakers worried about safety and the effect on casinos and hotels - with nearly US$15 billion (S$19 billion) already spent.

New reactor designs

To accelerate the deployment of nuclear power, countries including the US, Britain, Canada, China and Sweden are championing so-called small modular reactors (SMRs).

The appeal of SMRs lies in the idea they can be mostly prefabricated in factories, making them faster and cheaper to assemble than the larger reactors already in use.

But none of the new SMR designs are expected to solve the waste problem. Experts say designers are not compelled to consider waste at inception, beyond a plan for how it will be managed.

“This rush to create new designs without thinking about the full system bodes really poorly for effective regulatory oversight and having a well-run, safe, and reliable waste management program over the long term,” said Associate Professor Seth Tuler, of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and previously on the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.

Most of the new SMRs are expected to produce similar volumes of waste, or even more, per unit of electricity than today’s large reactors, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

SMRs can also be sited in areas lacking the infrastructure needed for larger plants, raising the prospect of many more nuclear sites which could become interim waste dumps too. And in the United States, “interim” can mean more than century after a reactor closes, according to the US nuclear power regulator.

Reuters contacted the nine companies behind the 11 SMR designs backed by the DOE’s fast-track programme. Some said nuclear waste was an issue for the operators of the reactors, and the government.

Others said they hoped technological advances in the coming decades would improve prospects for reprocessing fuel, although they agreed a permanent repository was still needed.

The prospect of a new wave of nuclear reactors, has rekindled interest in reprocessing spent fuel whereby uranium and plutonium are separated out and, in some instances, reused.

“Modern technologies, particularly advanced recycling and reprocessing, can dramatically shrink the volume of nuclear material requiring disposal,” the spokesperson for the nuclear energy office said. “At the same time, reprocessing does not eliminate the requirement for permanent disposal.”

Nuclear security experts, however, questioned whether reprocessing would be included in any of the new campuses.

“Every time it’s been attempted, it’s failed, it creates security and proliferation risks, the costs are enormous, and it complicates waste management,” said former DOE official Ross Matzkin-Bridger. He said the few countries reprocessing fuel were recycling between zero to 2 per cent, far below the 90 per cent promised.

A permanent problem

For now, most waste in the US, Canada, Europe, and Britain is stored on site indefinitely, first in spent fuel pools to cool and then in concrete and steel casks. France sends spent fuel to La Hague in Normandy for reprocessing.

The more than 90 nuclear reactors operating in the US - the world’s biggest nuclear power producer ahead of China and France - add about 2,000 tonnes of waste a year to existing stockpiles, according to the DOE.

Office of Nuclear Energy data shows that as of the end of 2024, US taxpayers have paid utility companies US$11.1 billion to compensate them for storing spent fuel, some of which can remain harmful to humans for hundreds of thousands of years.

Scotland’s Dounreay site, where the last reactor closed in 1994, has repeatedly extended its decommissioning period and budget due to complications handling waste, according to the British government, in an early sign of the issues the industry faces as older plants shut down.

Vast vaults are being stocked with low-level radioactive waste in large metal containers as Dounreay, once at the cutting edge of Britain’s nuclear industry, is dismantled.

Ever since the first commercial nuclear plant went online 70 years ago in England, the consensus has been that burying the most toxic waste deep underground is the safest option but there is still no repository in operation anywhere in the world.

Getting a repository up and running is a slow process. Governments need community buy-in and geological studies are required to determine the flow of groundwater and the stability of the rock up to 1,000m underground.

Finland has made the most progress and is close to opening the world’s first permanent nuclear repository in Olkiluoto - having also kicked off the process way back in 1983.

Posiva, the Finnish company behind the project, began transferring test canisters more than four hundred meters below ground in 2024. It told Reuters its goal is to start commercial operations this year, though it is waiting for the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority to approve the operating licence, which will be followed by technical checks.

Once up and running, separate underground tunnels will be filled with canisters made of copper and iron housing the waste, and then sealed forever.

Sweden began constructing its permanent repository in January 2025, aiming to have it running by the late 2030s. Canada has agreed a site in Ontario which it aims to be operational by the late 2040s. Switzerland and France have chosen sites too and hope to have their repositories open from about 2050. Britain is shooting for the late 2050s, but has yet to settle on a location.

Pending the construction of a permanent repository somewhere in the country, high-level waste from nuclear sites such as Dounreay is sent for storage at Sellafield in England.

Some decommissioned nuclear sites, including Dounreay, are also being promoted as locations for data centers, as they’re hooked up to the power grid already and won’t need to wait for a connection.

But the clean-up there has a way to go. Irradiated nuclear fuel was flushed into the sea decades ago and a “minor” radioactive fragment was found on a local beach as recently as January.

The last “significant” particle was found in April and fishing is banned within a 2km radius of Dounreay’s outlet pipe because of radioactive particles on the seabed.

In 2025, Britain extended the time frame for the Dounreay clean-up from 2033 to the 2070s. REUTERS