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Energy Systems and the Production of Nuclear Waste

Ian H. Rowlands

In the United States, nuclear power plants have produced, and continue to produce, a steady stream of highly radioactive waste. For now, that waste is stored “on-site,” at or near power plants, in facilities that were not meant to be used over the long term. This, it is widely accepted, is not sustainable. Instead, a more permanent structure is needed: a single nuclear waste depository that is specially designed to secure radioactive material for centuries. The decision as to where to build such a structure—or at least an interim structure that can consolidate all the waste in one safe location until a permanent facility can be built—remains to be made.

The purpose of this essay is to place the decision about where to put a nuclear waste facility within a broader context, and to describe how the nuclear waste disposal siting issue sits within a series of nested systems: nuclear power production, electricity generation, energy production, economic activity, and national well-being. Any single decision taken anywhere within these systems reverberates across all of them, imposing benefits and costs in different ways, to different extents, across different locations, and at different times. An appreciation for how a single issue—namely, selecting a site for (“siting”) a nuclear waste repository—sits within a broader landscape can serve to enrich our discussions about managing nuclear waste, and potentially improve our decision-making.

This essay is divided into three parts. First, it describes the nuclear system that has generated the waste and continues to do so. Second, it explains the significance of the nuclear energy system to how the United States generates its electricity and powers its economy. Third, it explores the growing debate over whether to expand nuclear energy as part of the fight against global climate change.

The Nuclear System That Has Generated the Waste

Before focusing upon the waste that is generated by nuclear power stations, it is important to understand more broadly how nuclear waste is created and the impacts it has.

Radioactive waste is a byproduct from a nuclear reaction. That nuclear reaction is usually triggered by uranium atoms being bombarded with neutrons in order to produce energy, heat, and isotopes. Those energy, heat, and isotope products make significant contributions to the energy, medical, defense, and research sectors. The waste that is created by these reactions, however, has no economic or societal benefit, and is dangerous to humans as well as other living things, so it must be managed carefully.

Radioactive waste is either low-level, intermediate-level, or high-level, categorized according to its degree of radioactivity. Examples of low-level and intermediate-level wastes include cleaning materials, protective clothing, used reactor-core components, and filters used to keep the reactor’s water system clean. Regulations that ensure safe stewardship of these low- and intermediate-level wastes for the long term are required and often issued by and enforced by a national nuclear safety commission, and effective management plans can usually be developed and deployed by local authorities.⁠1

But the high-level radioactive waste—the focus of this essay—is different. This waste is extremely hazardous, because it produces radiation doses that are fatal to humans during even brief periods of direct exposure. Moreover, because of its long half-life (a measure of the rate at which the radioactivity of a substance decays), that toxicity persists virtually indefinitely. As such, it must be handled judiciously at all times, for centuries to come. Specifically, it must be shielded so as not to expose people or other life to radiation, and the considerable heat it generates during its decay must also be managed appropriately.

In the United States, most of the high-level radioactive waste is spent (that is, used) nuclear fuel, originating from the operation of nuclear power plants. More than 90,000 tonnes (198 million pounds) of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants currently exists in the U.S., and that quantity is growing at a rate of approximately 2,200 tonnes (4.85 million pounds) each year.⁠2

When the first nuclear power plants were commissioned in the 1950s and 1960s, it was anticipated that high-level radioactive waste would promptly be sent off-site, either for commercial reprocessing or permanent disposal. Spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed in order to extract isotopes, which can, in turn, be used again as reactor fuel. Commercial reprocessing, however, is not currently (as of early 2025) being done in the United States, having been stopped in 1977 as part of wider efforts to thwart nuclear proliferation.⁠3 It is also costly. As for disposal, despite decades of effort to develop and implement a policy for permanent nuclear waste disposal in the United States—including selection by Congress in 1987 of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the only site to be investigated—a solution has yet to be put in place. As a result, high-level radioactive waste remains on-site at more than seventy nuclear power stations (both operating and inactive) across thirty-five states,⁠4 stored in steel and concrete casks. This on-site storage was never intended to be a long-term solution for disposing of high-level waste, and the communities that house those nuclear power stations did not consent to being hosts for nuclear waste storage.

A small volume of high-level radioactive waste has also been generated during the construction of nuclear weapons by the United States military. That construction, however, stopped at the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s (the nuclear weapons remain in operation, but no additions have been made to the arsenal), so no further additions to this waste stream have been made. Nevertheless, approximately ninety million gallons of such waste is being stored at three Department of Energy sites across the continental U.S.,⁠5 with potential relocation to a disposal site near Carlsbad, New Mexico in a project being administered by the Department of Energy.⁠6

Moreover, as the United States pursues a nuclear modernization program,⁠7 there is high potential for renewed warhead construction and thus new waste streams. It is, however, anticipated that management of those high-level radioactive wastes would continue to be treated separately from those produced by the energy sector.⁠8 This essay focuses, therefore, on nuclear power, particularly because it produces the vast majority of the United States’ high-level radioactive waste that requires proper management and disposal.⁠9

The Significance of Nuclear Energy to United States Society

Nuclear energy is an important contributor to electricity supply worldwide, present in thirty-one of the world’s approximately two hundred countries and territories and accounting for 9 percent of global electricity generation in 2023.⁠10 The United States is a leader in this industry, responsible for nearly 30 percent of global nuclear power generation.⁠11 Within the United States itself, nuclear power contributed 19 percent of total electricity generation in 2023.⁠12 Of the fifty U.S. states, twenty-eight have operating commercial nuclear power plants.⁠13 For eighteen of those states, nuclear was one of the two largest sources of electricity.⁠14

Taking a step back, it is useful to remember that energy is central to life and society. It is an enabler of development and prosperity. The services that energy provides—communications, refrigeration, heating and cooling, information provision, mobility, tooling, and the list goes on—allow us to work, to learn, to play, indeed to live, in thriving and enriching ways. We get that energy partly from electricity but also from the burning of fuels, typically oil or natural gas.

The ways in which different sources of energy (fossil fuels, uranium, renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal, and so on) are created, transformed, used, and eventually disposed of will have a range of associated impacts, both positive and negative. For instance, coal mining—which is part of a system that provides energy services like heat (for steel-making furnaces) and lighting (when a coal-fired power station generates electricity)—both creates jobs and disfigures landscapes, while burning coal to generate electricity creates toxic air pollution.⁠15 By contrast, other fuels will have other effects. Wind power emits much less pollution than coal power, but wind turbines can negatively affect the surrounding environment and the animals who live there, including birds, bats, and even marine life, if the turbines are built offshore.⁠16 Consequently, any particular resource choice to provide a specific energy service has a range of direct and indirect impacts associated with it.⁠17

In sourcing energy, society’s goal should be to amplify the positive impacts and to minimize the negative impacts. Consequently, energy choices should be made that are:

  1. as cost-effective as possible, so as to catalyze plentiful quantities of sustainable economic and social activities in society;
  2. secure and reliable (service interruption can be costly, even life-threatening);
  3. socially acceptable and widely accessible (energy is so critical, it is virtually a “right”); and
  4. environmentally benign, or even environmentally regenerative.

The fuel that is chosen to generate energy, whether it’s nuclear or coal or wind or something else, affects the extent to which we can achieve these goals. Hence, the energy choices we make are highly consequential.

The Current Debate About Whether or Not to Expand Use of Nuclear Energy

We should prioritize and work to advance options that deliver energy with low costs and significant benefits, including both direct and indirect costs and benefits. This task is made even more urgent by the impact that our current energy systems are having upon the global climate. By burning fossil fuels, energy systems are the primary source of greenhouse gases that are disrupting the world’s climate system. Most people have accepted that an “energy transition” is critical, which means moving away from systems dominated by fossil fuels to ones that make use of low-carbon energy options. The global community has recognized the need for this, with most leading nations having set a net-zero greenhouse gas emission target date.⁠18

Getting to net-zero is not easy. It can be helped, however, by electrifying (almost) everything in society. At present, electricity accounts for approximately one-third of the United States’s energy consumption.⁠19 Much of that other two-thirds is direct combustion of fossil fuels for heating (like natural-gas heaters in a home) and transportation (gas-powered internal combustion engines in cars), which results in greenhouse gas emissions. Moving that demand onto low-carbon electricity grids—for instance, by switching to heat pumps that provide heating and cooling for homes, or to electric vehicles—can potentially be an important climate change solution.

If we make combating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions a goal, which of the low-carbon fuels should be called upon to “green the grids”? Recalling the discussion about direct and indirect consequences—and recognizing that there are multiple eligible candidates (solar, wind, biomass, hydropower, geothermal and so on, along with nuclear)—it is inevitable that there will be comparisons made between resource options. We should welcome discussion and debate about the positive and negative impacts of these resources. Moreover, few are expecting a “silver bullet” to emerge; no single fuel will be the best option to provide every energy service in every part of the United States. Instead, different options will suit different circumstances. For example, in sunny Arizona, solar energy offers significant opportunities to both urban and rural populations, while a city like Chicago, with fewer sunny days but with access to extensive infrastructure and nearby wind resources, might decide to employ a mix of next-generation nuclear and wind power to meet the needs of its population.

As nuclear is considered amongst other potential energy resources, it has both pros and cons, each of which will appear to a greater or lesser extent given the particular context.

Starting with the direct cost of electricity provision, the history of nuclear power plant construction has unfortunately shown “negative learning.” That is, instead of getting better at building plants over time, we’re getting worse. Plants have gotten significantly more expensive, even as technology has improved and we understand the underlying science better.⁠20 A basic comparison of cost per unit of electricity delivered continues to cast a shadow on nuclear power’s relative attractiveness, especially when compared to renewable sources like wind and solar power, both of which have become gradually cheaper per unit of electricity over the past several decades.⁠21

Safety issues associated with the operation of nuclear power plants have been the other major concern. There have been high-profile accidents that have resulted in the release of radioactive material—in particular, accidents at Three Mile Island (Middletown, Pennsylvania, in 1979), Chernobyl (near Pripyat, USSR, in 1986), and Fukushima Daiichi (near Ōkuma, Japan, in 2011). These disasters have served to catalyze opposition to nuclear power in many countries, leading some to close their nuclear power plants before the end of their operational license (and their technical capability).⁠22

During 2023 and 2024, however, global discussions about nuclear power more frequently highlighted some of its indirect benefits. For example, nuclear power stations provide so-called firm, 24/7 power where and when energy is most needed. Their electrical output is not variable, hour-by-hour, as is the case for many renewable power stations, and their location is not fuel-source dependent: solar power is only available when and where the sun shines, and wind power only when and where the wind blows. Solar and wind installations can include storage technologies to deal with this variability, and they can be connected by transmission lines as required, but this adds to the costs and the planning requirements. Importantly, nuclear provides a potential source of low-carbon power all through the night and day, which is important for industries that depend on continuous energy. Nuclear power’s consistency of supply and relative mobility (in the sense that nuclear fuel can be transported to a generating station sited nearly anywhere) may also fit well with emerging demands that are similarly “flat,” such as the growth of data centers, driven by greater use of energy-intensive artificial intelligence applications. It is certainly the case that the major technology companies are exploring greater use of nuclear power.⁠23

Some argue that research into the next generation of nuclear power stations is showing great promise because of new technologies that could reduce the direct costs of building and operating these facilities—as mentioned above, a pitfall for nuclear. In the near-term, small modular reactors are perceived by many to offer the greatest promise. Further down the line, it may be nuclear fusion that presents highly attractive opportunities.⁠24 We should be clear, however, that both technologies are still in development, and their prospective timelines are reasonably far into the future.⁠25 Meaningful contributions to U.S. or global electricity supply from small modular reactors, for example, are not expected until the 2040s, at the earliest, and fusion well beyond that.⁠26 Neither technology has yet been tested in grid operations, and we do not know if the public, or energy and environmental regulators, will ultimately accept them.

Nuclear power has also been boosted by geopolitical developments during the past few years—for instance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s continued bravado internationally—which have placed a higher premium upon energy security. With work underway in the United States to ensure stable uranium supply chains,⁠27 and with the potential for the country to leverage its nuclear power expertise into international alliance-building and market-creation, some commentators emphasize that there are multiple indirect national benefits arising from increased use of nuclear power.⁠28

As we analyze the pros and cons of nuclear power, they must also be placed beside similar investigations of solar, wind, and the other options. Moreover, as noted above, each use-case will yield a different portfolio of potential benefits and drawbacks, and probably different recommendations. Nevertheless, some kind of “nuclear renaissance” may be underway,⁠29 buoyed by greater public support for developing nuclear power.⁠30

For the purposes of this book, however, we would be remiss if we did not note that building new nuclear power plants will further increase the amount of nuclear waste created—and therefore only make more acute the need to tackle the nation’s nuclear waste challenge by finding one or more sites to locate interim and/or permanent nuclear waste storage repositories.

Conclusion

The decision about siting a nuclear waste disposal facility is nested within systems that generate electricity, provide a range of energy services, power the economy, and allow societies and their peoples to thrive. These systems are complex and interconnected: choices are rarely clear-cut. Instead, baskets of both good and bad outcomes are associated with different options, and different people will value different outcomes in different ways. The distribution of costs and benefits will stretch across communities, and across time.

It is also clear that energy is a collective effort. Everyone wants the valuable energy services that allow countries to prosper, but few want to bear the costs that are needed to secure them: the visible intrusion of a wind turbine outside your home, the destruction of farmland by a hydropower dam, or the risk of a major nuclear accident in your region. Some communities recognize this inequitable distribution of benefits and costs and demand side-payments in exchange for agreeing to housing energy facilities, in order to redistribute the wealth created by energy generation and to compensate those who have shouldered a disproportionate share of the effort. In countries like Finland and Sweden, communities that have agreed to host storage facilities for nuclear waste have negotiated for various forms of financial support.⁠31

With nuclear power now and into the future, there are certainly potentially desirable outcomes to be had—not only those valuable energy services themselves, but also the associated positive climate impacts. But there are also costs and risks that are borne by a relative few—in particular, those whose communities are helping to provide those benefits by mining uranium, operating nuclear power stations, and hosting nuclear waste repositories. It would thus seem appropriate that our societies should ensure that these communities, and the individuals that make them up, are fittingly rewarded for their service. These questions of justice, and the balance of costs and benefits, are worthy of careful reflection as we make crucial decisions about whether, and how, to use nuclear power.

Notes

Can We Live with Nuclear Neighbors?

By Krzysztof Janas

Energy crises caused by wars and geopolitical tensions, the increasing demand for energy in the data and new technology sector, and the push for lower carbon emissions in an era of climate change are just a few of the factors contributing to growing interest in nuclear power in recent years. Since 2022, especially, several significant events signaled accelerating global enthusiasm for expanding nuclear energy generation: the first new nuclear reactor in the United States began operating in Burke County, Georgia;⁠1 Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and other tech companies announced plans to contract for small modular reactors to generate power for AI;⁠2 for the first time ever, the declaration following the United Nations COP28 Climate Change Conference listed nuclear as a technology to support decarbonization;⁠3 the European Union (EU) decided to include nuclear energy in its list of sustainable technologies and economic activities covered by the EU taxonomy;⁠4 and multiple polls indicate that an increasing number of people in developed countries support nuclear energy.⁠5

The arguments of proponents portray nuclear technology as a safe and environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. While calls are being made to reduce oil or gas extraction to combat climate change—leaving these natural resources “in the ground”⁠6—less attention is paid to the fact that the development of nuclear energy means a kind of inverse approach: storing nuclear waste in the ground, amid our natural environments.⁠7 Controversial discussions about managing nuclear waste from power plants have been ongoing for decades, in nations across the globe, focusing on questions of how and where to store, dispose of, or reuse spent nuclear fuel. Much attention is given to environmental issues, but also to the notion of community consent for the siting of nuclear waste repositories. How can we ensure that these communities are properly informed about and protected from risks, which must be counted in decades for interim storage facilities and in millennia for permanent repositories?

Community consent goes beyond just the risks of hosting a nuclear waste repository. It is also about how to live with nuclear waste, as a new component of the community—as, in a sense, a new neighbor in the area. This neighbor is unfamiliar, nonhuman, often unwanted, but always significant—occupying a substantial territory which is likely fenced and closely guarded, monitored, with access granted only to a few. At the same time, it is a different kind of neighbor than, for example, a traditional landfill. Nuclear waste cannot be managed and cohabited with in the same ways as abandoned cars or everyday trash, or even hazardous materials like e-waste from disused electronics. Spent nuclear fuel is waste that remains relevant, that draws attention and must be the subject of continuous concern and discussion, even if it is stored and kept only temporarily. It is waste that acts. It is waste that is radioactive.

There are communities that live with this kind of neighbor and benefit from it. But there are also communities that would never agree to host a nuclear waste repository—or, for that matter, a nuclear power plant—in their neighborhood. It seems virtually impossible to develop a nuclear energy system that would gain universal acceptance,⁠8 so that means our discussions of nuclear policy ought to focus on local conditions, opinions, and community futures. With nuclear power becoming a matter of increasing urgency, even a matter of national security, it seems worth asking questions: Would you and your fellow community members be willing to have such a neighbor? Could it be incorporated into the future landscape of your neighborhood and community? Could you live safely and peaceably together?

There Is Something Out There That Is Doing Something

Imagine that old friends come to visit. They want to get to know your area, plan a road trip, maybe go camping, and so they prepare an itinerary on a map. In the process, they encounter a sizable restricted area; perhaps it’s even blurred out on Google Maps. Has it been there before? What is it? And what is happening there? The construction and operation of an interim storage facility in your area means that “there” for a few decades will be “something,” and that this “something” is doing something. (A permanent repository will house waste that is doing something for thousands of years.) Nuclear waste is not indifferent, silent, and forgotten, like an old car resting for years by the roadside, a broken clock on a wall, or an abandoned house that you pass without even noticing, and which year by year deteriorates, eventually succumbing to degradation and absorption by the land, as in the novel Primeval and Other Times by Polish author and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk.

Anthropologists have observed across human cultures that waste is tabooed and deprived of identity, functioning as a “thing out of place.”⁠9 But even if radioactive waste is “out of place,” considered alien, not belonging to nearby communities or ecosystems, it cannot be ignored. It has its clearly defined place on the map and functions as significant in the area, as a neighbor that cannot be passed by indifferently; it affects the community’s dynamics and existing ways of functioning. Thus, the infrastructure associated with the storage of nuclear waste is noticeable, under constant care and control, creating and reshaping relationships: between the community and various levels of government and regulatory agencies, between labor and management at the facility, between the town and the people and groups working at and managing the facility, and more. Moreover, it is often a dominant feature of the landscape—it creates geographical boundaries, and the ability to cross those boundaries is limited. If we think of treating this waste as a neighbor, it would be a strange sort: someone to whom only some have access, and only after meeting certain requirements.

This infrastructure can be a landmark and a significant object also in the sense that it will affect land and property prices in the area, the directions of roads and railways, and the sets of opportunities in the immediate vicinity—where to build something, where to open a business, how to commute from home to work, where you are able to safely and legally walk, where you can hike or set up a campsite.

So, you have to tell your friends that, unfortunately, they cannot camp there. But does that mean they have to avoid this site, like the house of a neighbor across the street with whom you argue endlessly about the behavior of children or a dog? Does the radioactivity of the waste mean that the site could be dangerous for your visiting friends, or is the shielding sufficient to make areas near the facility relatively safe? Perhaps the facility and its surroundings become quite an interesting element of the landscape, where it’s worth visiting and taking pictures. Maybe guided tours can be organized so that visitors can learn about the science of nuclear energy.⁠10 Could the facility be an attraction not only for experts and tourists, but also for members of the community? Perhaps it becomes a source of pride and identity, or at least of curiosity. What is actually happening there, what technologies and devices are operating there, what is this something out there that is doing something? What is this radioactivity in practice, even while the underlying physical phenomena are invisible?

Neighbor of Special Care

Every technology involves some risk and the need to manage it properly. In a sense, this applies as much to nuclear technology and waste as it does to the air conditioning in your home. In the modern world, a house or apartment is no longer just a shelter for a family, or merely a building. Increasingly, homes are engineered machines which, like cars, require maintenance and affect the people and structures around them, and are tied into networks with them, from electricity grids to streets, sidewalks, and public transit lines. Hence the litany of safety checks that are periodically carried out on houses and apartments—of electrical installations, natural gas lines, ventilation, heating systems, chimneys, rooftop solar panels. What if similar checks applied not only to individual buildings, but to your entire community and territory?

Nuclear waste is a neighbor of special care and concern, and sharing space with it may require some kind of continuous vigilance. Locating a nuclear storage facility in the vicinity of your community means that there will constantly be something going on around this infrastructure, and maintenance and inspection efforts will likely extend to the surrounding areas, buildings, and natural features. Soil, water, and air quality surveys, measurements of geological movements, transportation traffic, and tracking of people in the immediate vicinity of the interim storage facility, when they are nearby and for what purpose, will be ongoing, not just periodic activities. Risk control and assessment (internal and operational, as well as external, including attention to radiation contamination and security threats) will be permanent aspects of managing the nuclear material stored in the facility.

The well-being and safety of the nuclear waste will thus be intertwined with the well-being and safety of your community for many years to come. If a storage facility is located in your neighborhood, that geographical area may take on new roles and shapes. People, infrastructure, nature, and the waste itself will be part of a shared environment that must constantly adapt to new challenges and circumstances. The question of whether you want to have such a neighbor is not just about assessing risks—it is about deciding what kind of future you are willing to live in. It is a question of how to live with nuclear waste, and whether you are prepared to accept the responsibilities, potential benefits, constraints, and supervisory or control practices that come with it. It is about the shape of a new kind of community for decades and generations.

Your Community and National Security

Waste is not a byproduct of the socioeconomic system we live in, but rather its foundation. There is no development without waste, and there is no ever-increasing consumption, new cars, technologies, gadgets, and the energy necessary for their production without more and more waste. It’s all too easy to forget that the electricity, cooling, and heat in our homes, the objects with which we surround ourselves, and the technologies we use every day have their source in certain resources (oil, metals, wood, water), but also their waste residues. Some waste is hard to perceive: carbon dioxide, suspended particles in the air, landfills pushed further and further beyond the field of sight and smell of residents, with consumer waste often sent overseas to poorer regions. Waste, in the sense of junk, can also take the form of low-quality food, shoddily constructed items and buildings, poorly managed physical and public space,⁠11 or even the endless reams of digital data stored in the cloud.⁠12 In a sense, without waste, there is no us. Waste is a constitutive element of society, and we deal with it constantly, because, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas argues, generating and dealing with waste is a continuous part of our efforts to construct order out of chaos.⁠13

As nuclear energy is once again recognized as an important and strategically valuable component of the energy mix in many countries, nuclear waste—often called “spent nuclear fuel,” when the waste is created as a byproduct of generating energy—becomes a new element in the production and maintenance of social and cultural order. In this sense, the issues of storage and disposal are not purely technical or logistical matters, but become a matter of politics and national security, global climate policies, and economics.

Locating a nuclear storage facility in your neighborhood, therefore, entails not only the need to monitor and control the proper functioning of this waste-management infrastructure in order to minimize risks to the local community and the environment. It is also a matter of higher importance. This new neighbor, this active waste management space where something is constantly going on, will be more than just an area on the map of your neighborhood. Your community’s future—for decades or even centuries and millennia—will be intertwined with the activities and fate of this nuclear storage facility, changing the prominence and status of your region, making it an important node in the network of politics and security on a national and global scale. It will be a place that is talked about, that is taken into account, that may end up in news headlines as well as in strictly classified reports.

The radioactivity of nuclear waste will make it impossible to ignore and pass by, but it may also empower your community, giving it agency and making it a significant player in the endless game of politics and socioeconomic development efforts. At the national level, the issue of nuclear energy is usually associated with practices of encoding collective visions of the desired direction of society. Think of some examples from the twentieth century. Faced with the global oil crisis in the 1970s, France made huge investments in nuclear energy as a tool of national sovereignty. In this vision, the French state appeared as a technocratic guarantor of progress, able to manage risks and offer citizens a stable future based on science, rationality, and central planning.⁠14 In South Korea, nuclear energy was closely intertwined with ideas of technological progress, modernization, and national development. It was part of the effort to build a strong, modern, and independent state in the wake of the chaos, division, and devastation of the Korean War. With nuclear infrastructure, your neighborhood, you and your neighbors, may also become a significant part of a national or global conversation about the future of society, by reinforcing specific concepts of what your nation stands for and aspires to.⁠15

More New Neighbors

If you were to tell your friends planning a camping trip or road trip about the nuclear storage facility, they might ask not only what is there and what is happening there, but also how is it happening: Who is managing it all? Who is overseeing what? How is everything organized? Considering the new composition and shape of your local community, these questions are all the more important because the “who” would not be abstract, not merely an alphabet soup of regulatory and scientific agencies from Washington, D.C., but actual people moving through your community, working in and around it, and perhaps living in or near it. After all, the infrastructure of a nuclear storage facility needs to be actively managed and maintained. Although a nuclear repository is not a factory with thousands of employees, your community would still expand to include new human neighbors. You might work alongside them or their partners, live across the street, shop at the same stores, and more. These new human neighbors would presumably include scientists, waste safety specialists, logistics workers, and representatives from various institutes and agencies who come for periodic inspections and routine maintenance.

The arrival of new people in a community is often met with fears or frictions related to new relationships between community members, potential mismatch with local customs and culture, or with more or less justifiable anxieties about an uncontrolled transformation of local identity. Questions of so-called gentrification—the phenomenon of changing the character of an area and community through an influx of more affluent residents, investments, and innovations—are often a focus for objections to changes in community membership and demographics. This process is no longer limited to urban regions, but can also affect other areas. How will you and others in your community treat these new neighbors? Will you perceive them as strangers who may be here only for a while and are associated with this problematic neighbor, with the radioactivity of nuclear waste? As intruders who may pose a threat? Or will you be open to their knowledge, experience, and participation in the community, and to the potential for positive change that may come with them?

Innovation is yet another aspect worth considering when thinking about a storage facility in your area. Nuclear waste is not only a matter of risk, danger, and safety, but also has the potential to generate new solutions. Their characteristics and dynamics can lead to creativity, not just destruction. Waste, including nuclear waste, can be seen as a source of innovation in the technological sphere, as well as in the social and cultural realms. There are many examples of nuclear technologies spurring innovation around the world. In Switzerland, a special radiation monitoring system has been set up in the region where the ZWILAG interim nuclear waste repository operates, covering air, water, soil, and food. The data is regularly published by the authorities, providing transparency and educational resources for local residents.⁠16 The French repository at La Hague, on the other hand, aims to be a pioneer in spent fuel recycling by developing advanced technologies to handle high-radiation processes, including remote-controlled systems and robotics.⁠17 Also worth mentioning are social innovations, such as those related to citizen empowerment and inclusion in decision-making; the process of siting a permanent nuclear repository in Finland, for instance, provides valuable lessons about how to engage members of the public in policy deliberations.⁠18

A key factor in fostering the development of innovation is cooperation between different groups and actors. Thus, recognizing the opportunity that hosting a nuclear storage facility may bring to your community requires not only considering the short-term benefits associated with this investment (these could include targeted tax reductions, financial compensation, and investments in local infrastructure or economic institutions), but also how this reconfigured community will function in the long term. Will your community be open to external knowledge and resources, and the changes they may bring? Will such changes be perceived as a necessary part of innovation and social development, or as a threat to a settled and perhaps cherished identity or way of life? If the facility provides interim storage and thus operates for decades, rather than centuries or millennia, what will the community look like when the facility begins to step down its operations and be phased out? Will the new people and ideas brought into the community by the facility be integrated for the long term, or will they phase out alongside the facility?

Concluding Thoughts: Nuclear Waste as a Neighbor

As the philosopher Timothy Morton puts it: “There is no away to which we can meaningfully sweep the radioactive dust. Nowhere is far enough or long-lasting-enough.”⁠19 Nuclear waste is always a “thing out of place”—there’s nowhere it fits comfortably, and as discussed here, it will need to be a subject of continuous oversight and scrutiny. But it also always has to be somewhere. As the stories in this volume suggest, there are many possible answers to the question of where nuclear waste might end up, what it might mean for the communities that take it in, and what forms future oversight, scrutiny, and engagement with the waste might take.

For consent-based processes in siting a spent fuel repository to be effective, full access to many types of information is needed to help communities make informed judgments about not only whether they want to live with nuclear waste but also, if they choose to do so, what form they want their future relations with that waste to take. This includes providing a rationale for the choice of location (why here? why us?); outlining benefits, risks, and ways to minimize and control them; and providing opportunities for community members to shape the design of the construction and operation of this infrastructure, as well as to participate in creating plans for mitigating any associated inconveniences.

Constructive and trust-building dialogue about the potential future location of nuclear waste is essential. Perhaps most important in this process are those questions asked by communities through which they build their own knowledge, understanding, and imagination of what to expect from a future that includes a nuclear storage facility in their neighborhood. The answers to these questions will help members of the community reach decisions about whether they can live with nuclear waste—whether they are willing to accept nuclear waste as a neighbor. The factors and questions that I’ve described earlier in this chapter do not fully exhaust the issues that communities could consider. However, it is fundamental to recognize that the course of consent-based processes in siting a spent fuel repository should not focus just on the technical questions and short-term risks and benefits, but on the broader horizon of community futures.

Notes

Waste No More

Alycia de Mesa

For leaders and members of communities participating in consent-based nuclear waste siting discussions, this essay provides a resource from anti-colonial and Native American perspectives, centering vital, sacred relationships to land, people, nonhumans, Indigenous Knowledge, and traditional cultural practices. For non-Natives, the concepts in this essay may be viewed as narratives counter to mainstream ideology or education. But for Indigenous peoples, these are concepts that, while uniquely different in expression amongst Tribes, are near to our collective hearts. Knowledge stems from a multitude of peoples, perspectives, lived experiences, and sources. As communities work together to collectively shape their futures—and the futures of the land and people affected by long-lasting hazardous wastes—they must broaden their perspectives. This includes recognizing and valuing the deep knowledge and memories of those who have lived in balanced, healthy relationships with the Earth and all its beings for thousands of years before colonialism, as well as those who continue to embody resilience today.

I often wonder why the burden is on Indigenous people to explain our worldviews and values to others who are non-Indigenous. Native American Tribes in the United States—including 574 federally recognized Tribes, over 100 state-recognized Tribes, and many others unrecognized⁠1—each have distinct languages, spiritual practices, and cultures. Yet most share a common belief: land is alive, and it is sacred. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have lived in deep interdependence with the land and alongside all living beings that inhabit it as co-inhabitants, stewards, and good relatives. If “relatives” rings as an odd word choice, consider the actual meaning: we as human beings, we as the people, are related to and in relationship with the land and all its inhabitants: water, wind, plants, rocks, minerals, animals, ancestors. Land doesn’t follow geopolitical maps and borders. Land simply is a state of aliveness that has always been intrinsically and interdependently intertwined with our own fate as human beings, individually and collectively. When Mother Earth as the bearer of life, as mother, as grandmother, hurts or is sick and suffering, so do we as her children. When she radiates health in her waterways, air, soils, minerals, flora, and fauna of rich biodiversity, we as the people radiate health and harmony alongside her. Not only we as the people now in this moment of time, but we as the future generations to come.

Conventional approaches to siting nuclear waste typically default to visions of unoccupied lands, hundreds of miles away from urban centers, yet often close to Tribal and rural communities. But for many Tribes, there is no such concept of “empty” land, or land that is not alive—and further, there is little or no separation between the topics of nuclear waste, industrial pollution, and colonial extractive industries like mining. All are part of a development mindset and enterprise that colonizes places, peoples, and resources in service of economic growth. The historical designation of “sacrifice zones”⁠2—places that are chosen to be sacrificed to the needs of industrial development—is grounded in the Western legal concept of terra nullius (Latin for “the land of no one”) as lands void of ownership, occupation, and habitation.⁠3 However, from sacred law perspectives, terra nullius does not mean empty. Land is richly occupied by traditions, cultures, religions, nature, ancestors, relatives, food ways—life and our relationships to life.⁠4 Land and all of its non-human inhabitants are alive, vibrant, self-governing, tied to creation stories, original teachings, oral histories, community lessons, Traditional Tribal Knowledge, survivance, and resilience.⁠5 Dr. Doreen Bird of Santa Domingo Pueblo summarizes:

There is a connection among Indigenous peoples around the world. We have similar issues with protecting what is sacred to us. The land, water, air, plants, animals—all life is sacred. We have a commonality of love for Mother Earth, and that helps us come together and stand for each other’s struggles with colonization, extraction, sustaining our communities along with humankind. What might be just a construction site to someone takes a deeper meaning when you reconnect to ancestral places. Our ancestors roamed and migrated through vast areas. We ended up in our current locations, but that doesn’t mean we are stagnant. Our people revisited places and checked up on the lands to make sure everything was okay. Now we are kept out of ancestral homelands with no trespassing signs. The encroachment upon our ancestral lands cannot keep getting swept under the rug. As younger generations start questioning the realities of the history of this country, we realize there is a fight for what’s most sacred—our Mother Earth and survival of life and humanity.⁠6

History Repeated

Forced dispossession of land, and removal of Indigenous people from these lands, underlies the narrative of the United States’ origin and formation. From the arrival of the first colonial settlers to the 1887 General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Act), which sold ninety million acres of Native lands to non-Natives, and through subsequent Congressional acts that seized even more land, 98.9 percent of Indigenous homelands, inhabited for thousands of years, were lost.⁠7 Tribal reservations tethered to the federal government’s authority and funds—combined with the diminishment of Indigenous lands, culture, language, land stewardship, and identities—are stark, cruel, and typically hidden histories and realities known well by Native people, but excluded from mainstream American education and public conversations.

Countless testimonies attest to how Native peoples have had their health and well-being stolen by the nuclear industry.⁠8 While they cannot be voiced in their totality here, a few examples are worth retelling. Spanning the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, lands covering over twenty-seven thousand square miles—larger than ten of fifty U.S. states—are held reverently by the Diné (Navajo) people.⁠9 As the largest Tribal reservation within the boundaries of the United States, Navajo Nation lives each day with the legacies of more than five hundred abandoned uranium mines that have desecrated the land, harming people’s health and the environment. For years, mining operations paid Diné workers with “mining supplies and minerals found onsite,” leading to contamination from uranium ore extraction, cross-contamination between miners and their families, constant and consistent uranium exposure, cancers, birth defects, and other reproductive health problems.⁠10 Today, enduring contamination from decades of abandoned uranium mines still affects aquifers, drinking water, traditional sheep herding and livestock, and traditional plants used for medicine and ceremonies. The soil in many areas of Navajo Nation contains enough uranium to cause life-threatening radiation exposure, causing extreme contamination and creating barriers for planting, playing, and building homes with traditional Diné methods using the soil.⁠11 Radiation exposure continues to be a deadly source of health issues for people of all ages, ranging from in utero to elders, including kidney failure, respiratory issues, and increased levels of cancer.⁠12

Near their Diné neighbors, the Laguna Pueblo people have, for decades, endured similar cancerous, respiratory, and damaged vital-organ health impacts from contaminated groundwater and soil due to mine tailings from the Jackpile-Paguate uranium open pit mines.⁠13 As of late 2021, forty years after the mine was closed, the Pueblo people were still waiting for a comprehensive health analysis to assess the effects of the uranium contamination.⁠14

Myrriah Gómez researches and testifies to the forced dispossession of Nuevomexicano ranches and Tewa Pueblo sacred lands at Pajarito Plateau in north central New Mexico to site Project Y for the Manhattan Project, where scientists and engineers employed by the U.S. government worked to develop the atomic bomb and to build a “nuclear empire” for the military-industrial complex and commercial industry.⁠15

Nearby in Nevada, Western Shoshone Tribe members suffer from elevated rates of leukemia and heart disease.⁠16 According to Ian Zabarte, the Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians, his people have endured 928 nuclear tests on the Shoshone territory, in violation of the 1863 treaty signed with the United States: 100 in the atmosphere and more than 800 underground.⁠17

Nearly twelve hundred miles away in southeastern Washington state, Yakama Nation members living near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where nuclear weapons material was produced during and after World War II, similarly experience unusually high incidences of thyroid cancer and congenital disabilities related to the history of radiation releases from the site.⁠18

For Native peoples at the epicenter of the environmental and health impacts of nuclear development, nuclear weapons and energy are the same. The military-industrial complex of nuclear weapons and the supply chains needed to produce them are nearly inseparable from nuclear energy, in the minds of the people in the crosshairs of the nuclear industry in all its forms.⁠19 Uranium is needed for all. Testing is needed for all. Storage of nuclear waste is needed for all. Something will inevitably go wrong at the expense of people and land. In the history of the United States, land treaties and the voices of the first peoples of these lands have never been prioritized: terra nullius as guiding theory and practice has always prevailed. Further, the range of detrimental impacts to humans, water, plants, soils, animals, and air have been closely guarded secrets, hidden from the people most exposed by the U.S. government and industry actors.⁠20

If you think these exploitations are confined to the past, be aware that nuclear colonialism is as fresh as the uranium transported by truck over Navajo Nation roads in the dead of winter this year, 2025, leaving many Native people on and off the reservation in fear once again.⁠21 It is as old and new as the Pinyon Plain Mine (formerly Canyon Mine), a uranium mine located inside the Kaibab National Forest, six miles from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim near mountains sacred to several Tribes. Trucks carry up to thirty tons of radioactive ore per day from the mine through Tribal and rural roads in northern Arizona and Utah, threatening contamination of local and regional groundwater resources vital to the Havasupai Tribe’s water supply.⁠22

Throughout the nuclear fuel cycle—the lifecycle of radioactive materials from mining through use to disposal in waste repositories—nuclear material doesn’t sit still in human use, but rather is transported hundreds and even thousands of miles around the country and the globe, threatening exposures to diverse peoples and groups.

Systems of Waste and Power

Legally and practically, modern industries cannot avoid generating waste as an inherent part and process of a production system. Waste and pollution are intrinsic to all production systems, with varying scales of harm to people, places, and other life forms—all of which are normalized as standard business practices.⁠23 But waste often involves more than just throwing something away. It also encompasses the actions taken to protect one’s rights and abilities to dispose of waste. And that often means silencing or eliminating opposition or resistance to waste practices. For waste systems to persist, there will be institutions and organizations that rid “people, places, and things that actually or potentially threaten the continuity of those systems” as a “technique of power,” perpetuating the practice of “wasting.”⁠24 When carried out as a practice of placing contaminated waste as a moving shell game within desert lands historically inhabited by Indigenous peoples,⁠25 it becomes what environmental historian Tracy Voyles calls “wastelanding”: the active redefinition of specific areas as places that are fit only for waste.⁠26

Some contend that waste siting across industries within Indigenous lands and within low-income urban neighborhoods “isn’t an accident but a strategy.”⁠27 Tribal sovereignty, as the legal basis for Tribal lands being exempt from state laws and regulations, is viewed as an “attractive” precept by the operators of nuclear waste facilities that are considered undesirable for densely populated urban and suburban areas—particularly affluent and non-Native-populated areas. Hence, the concept of Tribal sovereignty may shield nuclear power firms from environmental regulation and public outcry,⁠28 making the polluting of lands and people, and the practices of wasting and wastelanding, profitable for corporations and institutions.⁠29

In the context of affected communities, who speaks for the people? How is harm determined, and by whom? These are questions many anti-colonial scientists are asking.⁠30 Whether for predominantly Native or non-Native communities, these are also questions that can and should be considered in futures visioning: What happens to waste, and what are the impacts of it beyond “out of sight, out of mind”? How far away—in distance, depth, or both—should something hazardous be placed to allow people to consider it “safe”? Who decides what the legal definition of “safe” is, and for whom? Which geographical places and communities are omitted—or deliberately included—in conversations and processes of strategic planning and management? How does waste and its impacts change from region to region, culture to culture over space, place, peoples, and time?⁠31 Aside from human impacts, who speaks for nature, and what are nature’s rights?

The Rights of Nature

If trees can communicate with one another through networked systems, as some scientists contend,⁠32 should they not have a right to self-defense and even to be able to sue in the interest of their well-being? Should these same rights be extended to a body of water, or a mountain? Indigenous peoples have always understood human responsibilities to and with the natural world. Granting personhood and legal rights to natural entities—including the right to sue individuals, corporations, governments, and government agencies in a court of law—is what the movement known as Rights of Nature calls for. First suggested in 1972 by Christopher D. Stone in an essay for the Southern California Law Review, Rights of Nature proclaims a paradigm shift in legal and philosophical frameworks to recognize the inherent rights of ecosystems, nonhuman species, and natural entities.⁠33 Given their acknowledged and established relationships to the natural world and its entities since time immemorial, it should be little surprise that this shift to bestow voice, agency, and rights is being led by Indigenous peoples and communities around the world.

Rights of Nature is, in essence, a legal expression of the responsibilities, respect, relationships, and reciprocity embedded in many Tribal origin stories as “original instructions” for being of the Earth as a human.⁠34 Federally recognized Tribal governments within the United States—including White Earth Band of Ojibwe, Ponca Nation, and Tohono O’odham Nation—have designated legal personhood, statutory personhood, and constitutional provisions for specific nature relatives such as manoomin (wild rice), rivers, saguaro cactus, and/or nature at large, and granted rights within respective Tribal governments to protect these relatives from injury and harm.⁠35 Writing in the California Law Review, legal scholars Elizabeth Kronk Warner and Jensen Lillquist count six countries that have applied Rights of Nature at the federal level since 2021, along with several states and cities throughout the world that have passed some type of legislation and/or law. But within the United States, it is largely Tribal governments and municipalities who have done so since the early 2000s, with no federal or state participation.⁠36

Tribes are uniquely positioned and qualified to forward the Rights of Nature across legal, administrative, regulatory, and oversight processes. As a shift in legal and cultural thinking, it is Tribes who have the potential for the most success in advocating for Rights of Nature with the “potential to possess significant regulatory power.”⁠37 If definitions of harm to the land and its related living entities caused by nuclear waste are included in Rights of Nature discussions, what considerations should guide nuclear waste siting and how it is managed from the perspective of the land as a living being with legal rights?

Going Beyond

To consider nuclear waste siting and Indigenous land and people across time (past, present, and future), it is critical to go beyond the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted on September 13, 2007, which establishes minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of Indigenous peoples worldwide.⁠38 Further, it is critical to go beyond the distorted power differentials of “informed consent” processes from U.S. and Tribal government officials who may not represent the voices of Native aunties, grandmothers, medicine people, and youth.

Going beyond entails establishing and enforcing contractual systems of transparency and accountability that acknowledge and make visible harms that occur, provide rights for those harmed, and ensure that those responsible for harms are held accountable. Such contractual systems should be an integral part of any discussion about siting nuclear waste facilities, built on the rights of humans and the rights of nature. As such, how do we hold violators and offenders who cause harm and injury to human and non-human health and well-being accountable? Where is transparency in reporting and systems of legal recourse? And what about the voice, agency, and rights of the natural world within systems of accountability and recourse?

Are these questions reserved only for Native peoples? Or is going beyond and asking these critical questions relevant to all communities and all people? I would argue that as humans coexisting with land, often as a common denominator, going beyond to consider our relationships with the land, each other, and even the waste itself is crucial when considering just futures for all. If there is one thing we must all share, it is prioritizing the health of the land. Because the health of land is the health of us. As the fictional stories in this volume suggest, there are other ways of handling spent nuclear fuel from power plants besides treating it as waste and burying it deep underground, “out of the way,” in places thought of as wastelands. Perhaps one day we will see, at last, individuals, communities, and secular law not only deeply understanding and upholding their responsibilities to the Earth and one another but shouting in unison: Leave our lands alone.

Notes

The History of Nuclear Waste Policy and Consent-Based Siting

Jennifer Richter

The United States has been producing radioactive waste in large volumes since the creation of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Over the course of eighty years, more than ninety thousand metric tons of nuclear waste has been produced, the vast majority from nuclear energy production (seventy-three thousand metric tons) and the rest from defense-related activities. As of 2024, however, the U.S. has yet to solve the problem of safely managing nuclear waste, despite the 1982 passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) by Congress and its subsequent amendments. This essay provides an overview of the NWPA, including the origins of how the federal government has understood the problem of nuclear waste over time, and how the framing of nuclear waste as a singular problem with a singular solution has created a long-term intractable issue.

Origin Stories

The U.S. remains the only nation to ever use a nuclear weapon in war, stunning the world with the use of atomic weapons in Japan in 1945. The end of World War II was followed by the Atomic Age, with its race for ever-more-powerful weapons between the U.S. and the Soviet Union plunging the world into a Cold War. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. also began producing nuclear power, beginning with the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, which began operations in 1957. Both activities—manufacturing weapons and generating power—produce radioactive waste.

In 1957, the National Research Council, an independent body established by the National Academy of Sciences, released a report on the feasibility of geologic disposal of nuclear waste. The report examined the idea of putting radioactive waste into canisters and storing them underground, under the assumption that natural geological barriers will prevent radiation from moving through the environment. They noted that there were two major concerns for disposal: “1) where and how can we put wastes into the ground economically and under conditions which will not jeopardize the rights of others, especially in populated areas; and 2) what can we do with the large volume of wastes that have been and are yet to be produced at our production plants…?”⁠1 Physically, they noted that geologic disposal would be the most efficient and economical way to contain radioactive waste. But the report also warned of the inherent risks from nuclear waste: “[t]he hazard related to radioactive waste is so great that no element of doubt should be allowed to exist regarding safety…. Safe disposal means that the waste shall not come in contact with any living thing.”⁠2

At the time, nuclear issues in the U.S. were administered through the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a powerful agency responsible for safeguarding public health and the environment, but also for producing nuclear weapons and energy. The AEC acknowledged the importance of the questions regarding nuclear waste disposal but did not view them as pressing concerns; the organization’s focus was producing nuclear warheads for military purposes and promoting nuclear energy for civilian purposes. The AEC was eventually split into two agencies: the Department of Energy (DOE), which is responsible for manufacturing and managing nuclear weapons and managing nuclear waste (in addition to various non-nuclear activities), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is responsible for licensing and reviewing commercial nuclear power plants and nuclear waste facilities.

In addition to these two agencies, the 1970 establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signified increased national attention to risks to the environment and human health, including from nuclear power, nuclear weapons manufacturing, and nuclear waste. Several nuclear power plants were being licensed by the NRC and constructed by electricity utilities, contributing to a growing nuclear waste problem. In turn, the states that hosted these plants expressed growing concern about the buildup of waste at reactor sites. Utilities were reluctant to invest in new nuclear power plants without assurance that the waste streams would be taken off their hands.

The issue became pressing enough that, in 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which was meant to comprehensively address nuclear waste from commercially produced spent nuclear fuel.⁠3 Initially, the NWPA sought ten locations across the U.S. as potential sites for geologic repositories: seven located in salt beds, two in basalt, and one in volcanic tuff. It also stated that two repositories would be sited, one in the western U.S. and one in the eastern part of the country (of ninety-five reactors currently in operation in the U.S., only six are located west of the Great Plains.) In 1987, however, responding to resistance from states where these potential sites were located, Congress amended the NWPA to focus on just one site, the volcanic tuff site in Nevada, called Yucca Mountain. As a congressional act, the NWPA is legally binding; it mandates that all federal funding for research and development of a geologic repository to store spent nuclear fuel must be focused on the Yucca Mountain site.

The NWPA laid out a plan to create a repository that would be informed by scientific research on geologic sites, but it also represents a document that was supposed to foreclose further discussion and options for nuclear waste. The goal was to assure utilities, states, and the public that the U.S. could handle its growing volume of nuclear waste in an efficient and expedient manner. The NWPA focused on developing, regulating, and implementing a permanent repository, and promoted this aim by creating a set of directives supporting this development. The NWPA was clear that this was a unique facility, and that it would require creating new guidelines for radiation and public safety, as well as new processes and public institutions.

Some of the most critical policies set by the NWPA are:

1) Clear roles for executive agencies in nuclear waste management

The NWPA allocated roles for managing nuclear waste across the federal government, including the NRC, which would create a licensing process for the repository, and the EPA, which was charged with setting and enforcing radiation standards. The DOE was responsible for siting, constructing, implementing, and safeguarding Yucca Mountain, in the present and in the future. The DOE would also be responsible for actively monitoring the site after it was stocked with waste to capacity and closed, and then with constructing and maintaining passive engineered barriers to provide long-term safety for the foreseeable future.

2) Establishing a new agency to implement a permanent geologic repository

The original 1982 NWPA established the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management as the specific agency within the DOE tasked with coordinating and planning the actual implementation of the Yucca Mountain repository. When the office was established in the 1980s, the DOE itself was a relatively young agency, having been formed in 1977 out of its precursor, the Energy Research and Development Agency. The latter had been created when the Atomic Energy Commission was dissolved in 1975. As both the DOE and the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management were new, the agency had to learn how to coordinate across three agencies (DOE, NRC, and EPA), as well as with state, local, and tribal governments.

3) Creating a way to pay for the repository

The Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF) was designed to fund the construction of the Yucca Mountain repository. Electric utilities who owned and operated nuclear power plants were required to pay into the “nuclear kitty,” meaning ratepayers were being charged a tax to fund the long-term management and disposal of nuclear waste; if utilities did not agree to pay into the NWF, the NRC would not license their nuclear power plants. Utilities have paid over $40 billion into the NWF, and $13 billion has gone into the development of Yucca Mountain. Because the Yucca Mountain site remains inoperable and no other waste site has been developed by the DOE, individual states and private utilities have sued the federal government numerous times to recoup costs from storing nuclear waste at reactor sites; fines have totaled over $5 billion. In 2013, utilities were allowed to stop contributing to the NWF until a repository was established. Following the decision in 2010 by the Obama administration to cease funding for the study and construction of Yucca Mountain, a federal court ruled in 2013 that the DOE had to stop collecting payments for the NWF, as there was still no repository under construction. Originally, the NWF was supposed to be held in a separate funding account reserved for the construction of the Yucca Mountain facility, but the money was almost immediately absorbed into general government funds during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Funding for nuclear waste must now undergo a special appropriations process from Congress, as there is no specific funding earmarked for Yucca Mountain, which even today remains the only legally allowed site for permanent disposal under the terms of the NWPA.

4) The possibility of interim sites for storing waste

The 1982 NWPA set a limit of seventy thousand metric tons for the amount of waste allowed in an initial repository, in order to encourage the selection of a second site. To gain time to site and build these two permanent repositories, the NWPA promoted the creation of interim “Monitored Retrievable Storage” sites that would temporarily hold waste underground. Several Indigenous communities and four counties stepped forward as interested parties. Ultimately, none made it past the initial interest stage, partly due to fears on the part of state governments that de jure temporary sites would become de facto permanent sites.⁠4

5) Appointing a negotiator to work with communities interested in hosting waste facilities

In order to negotiate the Monitored Retrievable Storage sites, the 1987 amendments to the NWPA called for the creation of an Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator to work with communities potentially interested in hosting them. The office was supposed to be independent of the DOE, but was never fully trusted by communities or state governments. The Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator was only operational from 1990 until 1995, when funding for the office was not renewed.⁠5

6) Establishing an independent review board

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board was established under the 1987 amendments to the NWPA to be an independent scientific advisory board that reviews waste management strategies. They continue to report both to Congress and the DOE, and also offer reports to the public and non-governmental organizations.

7) Public participation in siting processes

The NWPA contains language for public participation, including state and tribal communication. However, the specifics of engagement were vague, and the application was very limited, relying on a “decide-announce-defend”⁠6 model of public engagement. In the NWPA, the DOE was required to hold various public hearings, including for the site selection and characterization plan for Yucca Mountain. In these meetings, the DOE would inform the public of their intention to site the Yucca Mountain facility and then receive comments. However, there was no mechanism for a “back and forth” for communities to engage with the DOE representatives. There was also no specification for what the DOE should do with public comments, beyond collecting them.

The DOE was required to notify tribes and Indigenous communities whose land may be affected; however, the onus was on tribal communities to prove that they would be affected. There is no established process for tribal communities to make these claims, and no funding designated by the NWPA for tribes to conduct independent environmental studies. For states, the DOE was charged with creating consultation and cooperation agreements that would define how states would engage with the process. However, the NWPA left the details of these agreements to be negotiated between individual states and the DOE; Nevada, as a resistant state, never entered into a consultation and cooperation agreement, despite the fact that the DOE expended billions of dollars to develop the Yucca Mountain Project in the state.⁠7

A Shift to Consent-Based Siting

The NWPA timeline was extremely ambitious and aggressive. The act gave the DOE sixteen years from inception to completion, including site selection, testing, construction, and opening of a permanent nuclear waste repository. The process began in 1982. Ten potential sites were selected and, in 1987, winnowed down to Yucca Mountain. The act’s goal was to complete the facility and begin storing waste by 1998. Almost immediately, however, the NWPA ran into complications and resistance due to competing claims and political goals. The federal government wanted a permanent repository, the State of Nevada wanted to reject the process by which they were selected to host the site, Native American tribes resisted the waste due to cultural concerns, and the community around Yucca Mountain wanted the immediate economic development opportunities they believed would accrue from the facility. Funding for Yucca Mountain became a political “hot potato,” with different presidential administrations putting forward different goals for the site. In 2010, the Obama administration decided to halt funding to the project, effectively ending the possibility that Yucca Mountain will serve as the nation’s nuclear waste repository. Yet, Congress has neither allowed the NRC to withdraw the license application for Yucca Mountain, nor amended the NWPA to allow exploration or research on any other potential site for a permanent waste facility.

To create a path forward out of this tangle, President Obama appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission for America’s Nuclear Future (BRC). The BRC was tasked to recommend new ways to site nuclear waste repositories that would focus less on the technical aspects and more on the political aspects of siting a controversial facility. After visiting a variety of national and international nuclear communities, in 2012, the BRC made several recommendations to the DOE, including pursuing a consent-based siting approach that would give prospective host communities the right to choose whether to accept a facility or not.⁠8 The BRC also called for a phased, adaptive approach. By “phased,” the BRC meant to create a process that could be used to identify several sites for interim storage, federal waste, and commercial waste at different times.⁠9 This process would be legally durable and allow communities ample time to ask questions and negotiate. The process would also be “adaptive” in the face of changing conditions, including community feedback and concerns, technological innovations that could affect waste management, as well as new scientific information about prospective sites. Additional recommendations from the BRC included establishing an independent organization to manage the federal nuclear waste program and developing interim storage sites that would consolidate the nation’s spent nuclear fuel in one or more locations until a permanent facility could be sited and built.⁠10

In 2013, the DOE issued a report agreeing with the BRC’s findings and committing to a “phased, adaptive, and consent-based approach to siting and implementing a comprehensive management and disposal system.”⁠11 Subsequently, in 2015 and 2016, the DOE held roundtable discussions with public stakeholders across the country and, in 2017, drafted a consent-based siting process that would begin with public engagement activities.⁠12 The DOE’s efforts were cut short by the first Trump administration, however, which temporarily halted the efforts to advance consent-based siting and returned, instead, to a focus on Yucca Mountain. Four years later, the Biden administration picked up where the Obama administration had left off and, under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, allocated more than $27 million to explore the creation of interim storage facilities via a consent-based approach.

This history has set the stage for DOE’s current approach. As of this writing in the summer of 2025, the DOE is focused on siting and building one or more interim storage facilities across the U.S. to consolidate waste from commercial plants for the next fifty to one hundred years. And they are committed to doing so via a process of “collaboration-based siting,” after a shift away from the “consent-based siting” language recommended by the BRC. Siting these interim facilities will severely test the DOE’s commitment and ability to implement a process that meaningfully incorporates public engagement and feedback, especially with potential host states and communities with whom the DOE will need to negotiate the forms of collaboration that define the process. The DOE is aware that they, as an agency with a complicated history of public engagement, cannot unilaterally define the terms of engagement—whether they call it “consent” or “collaboration”—without being accused of a heavy-handed approach. This means that the DOE must negotiate the meaning of collaboration in coordination with the states and communities they engage with, especially regarding the possibility that a community might later opt to withdraw its agreement to be a host for a facility. For their part, communities will have to grapple with how to negotiate for themselves whether to collaborate in siting a future nuclear waste facility in their backyards, and, if so, imagine how such an interim facility might change their community, for better or worse, over many decades.

The DOE has noted three additional critical elements that will shape and inform this process:

  1. A greater emphasis on equity and environmental justice;
  2. An increased role for host communities in developing site-specific social, cultural, or environmental criteria for assessing the viability and safety of building a waste facility in a particular location; and
  3. Expanded funding to support community participation in the siting and assessment process.⁠13

These elements imply that the DOE has learned much from the past forty-five years of grappling with the political and social dimensions of what the agency initially thought would be a straightforward engineering issue. The consent-based siting approach was promising in that it put local communities first and recognized that communities must be part of this process early and as partners to federal projects. Hopefully, collaboration-based siting will do the same. At the same time, the DOE must deal with state agencies and governments, as well as transportation issues across the country (waste, after all, must travel to the facility, wherever it may end up, from all across the U.S.). It must also contend with the systemic mistrust of the DOE by states and the public, especially in regards to the fair and equitable siting of a permanent repository. As numerous observers have noted, nuclear waste can be handled only “at the speed of trust.”⁠14 Trust is incredibly hard to build, but very easy to break. It remains to be seen how the DOE will gain public support and trust not only today, but also for the foreseeable future and beyond.

Notes

Successful and Unsuccessful Siting of Nuclear Waste Facilities

Allison M. Macfarlane

Picture an image: three men stand outside in the sunshine in front of Sweden’s nuclear waste transport ship. Two of them, the mayor of Forsmark and the CEO of SKB, Sweden’s nuclear waste management company, wear large smiles, while the third, the mayor of Oskarshamn, scowls. The photo marks the moment when SKB awarded the country’s nuclear waste repository to Forsmark. Though it might seem incongruous that the “winner” of what is essentially a nuclear waste dump was happy, there are important reasons for a community to desire such a facility.

For a community to consider hosting a nuclear waste facility, they must trust the siting process, have a say in the outcome, and receive something in exchange for their efforts and for the risks they are assuming. Communities should understand the range of siting processes that have been used elsewhere, and the elements of those processes that they could demand or have access to. Through a series of examples, this essay presents elements of successful and unsuccessful siting processes that communities should be aware of. We will start with cases of unsuccessful nuclear waste facility siting and then move to cases of successful siting, to highlight what works and what doesn’t. We will conclude with a set of best practices that communities can ask for in exchange for their participation in the siting process.

What Does Not Work in Siting Nuclear Waste Facilities

Perhaps the best-known failure to site a nuclear waste facility is found right here at home, the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, which was meant to host a geologic repository, deep underground, for used nuclear fuel from power plants and high-level⁠1 nuclear waste. The United States followed a “decide-announce-defend”⁠2 process in which the federal government selected the site, and then spent the rest of the time defending it against objections from the State of Nevada. The U.S. Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the only site under consideration in amendments to the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. By 2002, the Secretary of Energy (at that time, Spencer Abraham) and the President (George W. Bush) had approved the site, and Congress rapidly overturned the State of Nevada’s veto of the site.⁠3 Though the Department of Energy applied for a license to construct a repository in 2008, by 2010 they had abandoned the application. Since that time, Congress has not appropriated any funds to work on the site, and the country has been stuck at an impasse. The Yucca Mountain facility was forced on the State of Nevada, which consistently opposed it for more than thirty-five years—clearly not a successful siting strategy.

Australia’s attempts to find a permanent site to house its low-level nuclear waste offers another perspective on the failure in siting these facilities. Australia has been trying to find a site for disposal of this waste since the late 1990s, with multiple siting attempts each followed within a few years by failure. In their most recent attempt, the Australian government asked for landowners to volunteer their lands in exchange for monetary compensation. In 2018, out of twenty-eight volunteered sites, the government selected two sites in the state of South Australia for more detailed study. Both communities, Hawker and Kimba, had adjacent lands owned by traditional Aboriginal owners.

The Australian government failed in part due to inconsistent messaging and a long history of past bad experiences with nuclear weapons testing and subsequent contamination. For example, the government minister in charge of siting a future waste facility committed to find a site that enjoyed “broad community support,” which he defined as 65 percent “yes” votes in a referendum. When only 57 percent of voters in Kimba approved the facility (a majority of Hawker residents turned it down), the minister redefined this as “broad community support.” Furthermore, voting boundaries in the two communities under consideration were inconsistently drawn. In Hawker, members of the nearby Aboriginal community were allowed to vote; in Kimba they were not. This led the Barngala people from the Kimba area to sue the government, and in 2023, they won when the federal court overturned the decision to site the facility in Kimba on procedural grounds.

A coda to the recent Australian experience is that those in Kimba who supported siting a facility in their community were shocked to learn that the government decided to abandon the process after they lost the court case. Australia’s parliamentary government had changed hands, from the Liberal Party to the Labor Party. Since the waste facility was largely dependent on individual ministers to push it forwards, there was no longer the will to continue the program within the new government. As a result, the community, which now had a partially constructed medical facility and other partly funded facilities supported by funds from the siting process, was left hanging and angry.

Prior to the 2023 court ruling, the government’s decision to go forward with a nuclear waste facility in Kimba had torn the community apart, with families and friends no longer on speaking terms. Those who supported the facility were hopeful that it would bring jobs, revive their economically dying town, and provide services such as banks and medical personnel. Those who opposed the facility worried about its impacts on tourism, property values, and agriculture. A contact who worked for the Swedish SKB waste management company once told me that if a community had become too divided by waste siting, then the company would walk away from that community—nothing was to be gained by destroying the fabric of a community in the process of establishing a facility.

What Does Work in Siting Nuclear Waste Facilities

The siting of nuclear waste facilities can be successful. In this section, we examine four examples of countries that have successfully sited nuclear waste facilities:

  • Finland, which is in the process of constructing a deep mined repository for used nuclear fuel from nuclear power reactors;
  • Sweden, which has licensed a repository site for used fuel from power reactors;
  • Belgium, which successfully sited a low-level waste facility; and
  • the United States, which has operated the only deep geologic repository for intermediate-level waste in the world, in southeastern New Mexico.

Other countries have also successfully sited nuclear waste facilities, including France, Switzerland, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, and others. One common characteristic among many of these countries is that most tried and failed multiple times before they got it right.

Finland selected a site for its deep geologic repository adjacent to one of its nuclear power plants after a process that considered four other locations for the facility. The community there, Olkiluoto, near Eurajoki, is familiar with nuclear facilities, hosts a nuclear power plant, and has already benefited from the power plant’s economic benefits. The community was offered compensation in the form of a community center that provided meeting space, a gym, a restaurant, and a hotel. Funds related to siting also supported the construction of a senior center for aging citizens. These are facilities that the community decided were most needed. The implementing company, Posiva, spent years meeting with the local community, having discussions in residents’ homes, listening to their concerns, and addressing these concerns, even when their own experts were not convinced anything was to be gained scientifically. What was gained, though, was the trust of the community, an essential element of siting.

Similar to Finland, Sweden put much thought into its siting process by its third round of siting. The first two attempts had resulted in failure. Initially, they had followed the “decide-announce-defend” model that the U.S. had adopted for Yucca Mountain. When the locals discovered that the geologists tromping around their lands were looking for a potential repository site, they sent them packing. In the second attempt, Sweden asked for volunteer communities and only received applications from locations inappropriate to host a repository. Finally, SKB, the country’s nuclear waste management company, approached communities who already hosted nuclear facilities and were comfortable with nuclear technology. Two of these, Oskarshamn and Forsmark, were found potentially suitable and studied in detail. Both communities had over 80 percent support for a waste facility. This support resulted in part from the fact that, as in Finland (and in all successful siting), they were allowed to veto the site prior to licensing if they were not comfortable moving forward with it.

SKB provided Oskarshamn and Forsmark with funds to hire their own technical experts to vet information provided by the company. They also funded a public interest group that opposed the repository, which provided a check on public claims they were making in support of the facility. Finally, they created an interesting funding structure to ensure that both communities stayed in the “competition” until the final decision. The “winner” of the site would receive 25 percent of the funds, as well as the longer-term jobs and economic inputs from the facility, while the “loser” would receive 75 percent of the funds.

The low-level waste site in Belgium, in the town of Dessel, provides an example of how a community can partner with an implementing agency. In Dessel, the community insisted on forming a formal partnership with the implementer so that they would have a say over the waste facility. At one point, the community partners insisted that cameras be installed below ground to ensure that the facility remained safe. The waste agency did not see the point of the added expense of the cameras, but eventually relented and installed them. To the waste agency’s surprise, the cameras have provided useful data for the safety of the facility.

The final example is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), located in southeastern New Mexico.⁠4 WIPP provides an example of how a waste facility can be successfully sited in the U.S. WIPP is a deep geologic repository for intermediate-level wastes from the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and has been in operation since 1999. In the 1970s, the community of Carlsbad, New Mexico had grown concerned that the local phosphate mines, which had provided a decent living for residents, were in decline. The town councilors had heard about attempts to site a geologic repository in salt rock in Kansas and offered up their own community, which is built atop deep layers of bedded salt, for the same purpose. But the state government in Santa Fe was not convinced. They were concerned about the transportation of radioactive waste through the center of their city on its way to Carlsbad, and they were concerned that the federal government would have sole oversight of the facility.

Over the course of about twenty years, these concerns were raised and then ameliorated: the federal government built a bypass road around Santa Fe (which opened up new real estate properties and now has some of the highest-value real estate in Santa Fe), passed a federal law limiting the type of waste that was allowed to be disposed of at WIPP, and offered the state oversight of the facility through federal environmental protection law. Since some of nuclear waste ready for disposal at WIPP was mixed with hazardous waste, this gave the state the ability to regulate this waste through the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, through which the federal Environmental Protection Agency cedes to state environment departments the responsibility to oversee the regulations in the act. Finally, Carlsbad residents were offered free radiation body scans to ensure that the facility was not adversely affecting their health.

Best Practices for Siting and Operating Nuclear Waste Facilities

The siting of a nuclear waste facility should be a participatory process, one in which community members are invited to provide their views, express their concerns, and receive answers to their questions in a timely manner. Decide-announce-defend as a siting strategy rarely, if ever, works in a democracy. Clear political pressure can also poison the prospects for success, as can repeatedly changing the “rules of engagement” around how a siting decision will be made and what the community will receive in recompense. Failure can be certain when there is a lack of trust in the implementer (whether it’s a government agency or a private-sector company), a lack of transparency about the process and decision-making, or a lack of openness to concerns of the public. At the same time, while complete agreement at the community or state level is likely unattainable, a clear consensus should exist to move forward with a site.

Common best practices in successfully siting these facilities include a veto or opt-out for the affected community. This veto can be exercised by a referendum, a vote of a city or county council, or a state legislature. From the Australian experience, we learn that clearly defining the boundaries of who gets a say to opt-in or opt-out is important. Often an opt-in/-out referendum should be held before a license application is submitted, as this step incurs significant costs.

Preceding the referendum should be a lengthy period of interactions between the implementing agency and the affected community—and perhaps surrounding communities—to answer questions, to explain the process, to go out on the land under consideration to better understand how the community interacts with and makes use of it, to better understand special knowledge the community has about the land, and to explain how the land will be used in waste siting. Other parties may try to engage at this point as well, either promoting or opposing a waste facility. A community needs to consider how to manage such input into their decision-making process. The implementer should provide funds for the community to hire their own independent experts to fact-check claims made by the implementer and others prior to any decision-making. The community should proceed with a referendum once they feel they have enough information to go forward.

Another universal factor in siting is the provision of compensation to the affected community in some form. To consider hosting a nuclear waste facility is a negotiation process. The community should understand that it holds many cards and can ask for help and compensation. In some cases, this can be direct payments to the community to use as they wish. In many other cases, though, the implementer fulfills specific needs identified by the community: community centers, gyms, senior centers, schools, businesses, medical facilities, or development to support a related industry. Some of these monies can be directed towards an antagonistic public interest group who will point out potential safety and security issues, so as to produce an even stronger case for a facility.

A partnership between the local community and the implementer to select the site and examine potential safety and security issues can powerfully build trust. Such a partnership can last through operation and decommissioning of a facility, over many decades. The roles and responsibilities of the partners must be clearly defined at the outset to further increase trust. This kind of partnership can go a long way towards ensuring the longevity of the project, and can surface significant issues before they become insurmountable. Moreover, an implementer that is operating well will ensure that strong relationships are developed and maintained between the community members and a set of implementer staff members. If there are constantly changing points of contact for the community, little trust can develop.

In the end, the most important factor in a successful siting process is trust. And trust is a “two-way street” in siting a nuclear waste facility. The community must trust the implementer, but the implementer must also trust the community. It is that second condition in trust that is often ignored—but at the peril of those hoping to succeed.

Notes

Experiences with Nuclear Siting in Nevada and New Mexico

Nicole Cox and Jennifer Richter

One of the central challenges for communities who are considering hosting a nuclear waste facility is the complexity of everything involved, including the engineering and operation of the facility, the evaluation of its potential safety, and the politics of its approval. Scientifically, sites must be assessed for their long-term suitability as places to safely store nuclear waste for potentially hundreds or thousands of years, well away from hazards like water, earthquakes, or human exposure. Technologically and operationally, sites must be engineered and managed to provide that safety, both now and for the long-term future. Politically, sites must be selected and agreed upon in the layered democracy of the United States, which both grants and restricts the rights of federal, state, local, and tribal governments.

This chapter offers a brief history of the complexities associated with siting two nuclear waste repositories in the United States: first, Yucca Mountain, Nevada, a proposed facility for disposing of commercial nuclear waste from civilian nuclear power plants, which has been the principal focus of U.S. nuclear waste science and policy for the past forty years, but which has not yet been built or opened; and second, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a facility for disposing of military nuclear waste from U.S. weapons manufacturing in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which opened in 1999. For many reasons, although the two sites have encountered similar issues, they have experienced very different histories, with very different outcomes. We hope that, together, these two cases will provide communities with a better understanding of the complicated and tangled priorities that arise when national imperatives become tangible in the form of local projects, and the many layers in between.

Yucca Mountain

The Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) in southern Nevada is currently the only site in the United States designated as a permanent location for storing nuclear waste generated by civilian nuclear power plants, which the nuclear industry and experts refer to as spent nuclear fuel. The site was first designated by Congress as the nation’s civilian nuclear waste repository in a 1987 amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That decision was subsequently reiterated by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2002, after fifteen years and $13 billion of scientific research into its safety. Despite these federal decisions, however, state and tribal officials have rejected the use of the YMP to store nuclear waste, and it has yet to open.⁠1

The case of Yucca Mountain offers valuable insights into the history of nuclear waste management in the U.S. The ongoing failure of the YMP to successfully build a permanent nuclear waste storage facility has, in recent years, fundamentally reshaped policy at the Department of Energy (DOE). Today, the DOE is focused on interim storage facilities, which would store waste for a number of decades, but not permanently, along with a collaborative approach to public engagement that systematically involves potential host communities throughout the siting process, starting in its earliest stages. Exploring the historical context of Yucca Mountain as a permanent geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. helps explain why this shift has happened and how it has been informed by conflicts over science, engineering, and the politics of resistance from the State of Nevada.

The Selection of Yucca Mountain

In 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed the DOE to examine ten potential sites for hosting a permanent nuclear waste repository. In 1987, however, Congress amended the act and designated Yucca Mountain as the nation’s only legally allowable site for a permanent geological storage facility for nuclear waste from commercial nuclear power reactors.⁠2 The amendment directed the DOE to continue studying Yucca Mountain and to engineer the mountain into a suitable site for a permanent repository. This the DOE did, implementing extensive new scientific research into the geological characteristics of the YMP site and its long-term ability to safely store nuclear waste without releasing radioactive material into the environment, as well as beginning engineering work to prepare the site for future waste disposal.

In 2002, based on its research, the DOE determined that the YMP would “likely” remain safe for the required thousands-of-years timeframe and therefore was a suitable site for a permanent geologic nuclear waste repository.⁠3 This decision mixed science, national security, and a sense of urgency to find somewhere to put the nation’s rapidly growing accumulation of nuclear waste. Explaining the decision, U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham argued that selecting Yucca Mountain as the site of a permanent repository was a “critical step forward in addressing our nation’s energy future, our national defense, our safety at home, and the protection of our economy and environment.”⁠4 He also noted that “a broad spectrum of experts agrees that we now have enough information, including more than 20 years of researching Yucca Mountain specifically, to support a conclusion that such a repository can be safely located there.”⁠5 Throughout its communications regarding the suitability of the YMP site, the DOE has continued to emphasize these three themes: the importance of a permanent waste repository for national security, the need for expediency in securing a site to handle the nation’s growing stream of nuclear waste, and the need to select a site that adheres to scientific assessments of long-term safety.

Scientific Complexities

In the decades following the 2002 DOE decision, however, a number of scientific concerns have been raised about the safety of the YMP. Some nuclear materials expected to be stored at the site will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years, a timespan which is almost unimaginable for human societies and which raises hard questions about the meaningfulness of scientific models. Recent assessments using newer technologies and factoring in human-induced climate change have raised questions that threaten ballooning costs and further delays in opening the site.⁠6 Studies show, for example, that the movement of water through the site and potential seismic activity pose complicating factors for waste storage.⁠7 Protecting against these risks would require the engineering of complex and costly physical barriers. To mitigate the issue of water moving through the site, one proposal argued for constructing a titanium “drip shield” over the waste stored in the mountain, to be implemented one hundred years after the site’s opening.⁠8

Another topic of scientific contention about the safety of YMP has been the amount of exposure to radiation legally allowable from the repository. To set legally permissible limits, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first had to decide which approach to use: to assess how much radiation is directly released from the site itself, or to evaluate how much radiation nearby communities are exposed to and what effects such exposure would have on their health. The different approaches yield very different amounts of allowable radiation exposure. Ultimately, in 2001, following the first approach, the EPA set a maximum allowable exposure standard of fifteen millirems per year over ten thousand years; this exposure level was based on the premise that the site would be undisturbed, for instance, by seismic movement or human intrusion. Nuclear proponents criticized EPA’s standards for being too strict. However, the State of Nevada and environmental advocacy groups sued the EPA for numerous issues with the ruling, including that the ten-thousand-year assessment was too short for such long-lived isotopes as plutonium-239, which has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years;⁠9 additionally, they felt the radiation limit was too generous.⁠10 The lack of consensus concerning the EPA’s ruling has created ongoing tension among the DOE, the State of Nevada, and the communities surrounding YMP, contributing to continued inaction and dissatisfaction from all parties.

Community Participation and Engagement

The selection process for YMP has also been contested, complicated by a lack of meaningful public or community engagement and interwoven local, state, tribal, and federal relations. Since 1987, most public sentiment in Nevada, and especially among state policymakers, has vehemently opposed the project. For state officials, a major concern about the siting of YMP is the safety of transporting spent nuclear fuel to the site and the environmental viability of the region for thousands of years to come. Yucca Mountain is also considered sacred to numerous Indigenous communities in the region, including the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute,⁠11 and tribal leadership have spoken out against using their sacred lands to permanently store nuclear waste. Despite state opposition, however, local communities near the site itself, and especially the commissioners of Nye County, within which Yucca Mountain resides, have supported the project, which they hope will bring jobs and economic activity to the region.

These tensions came to a head in 2002, after the DOE decision to reiterate the suitability of the YMP site. In the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress included a clause enabling states and tribes to vote against the YMP, as well as a clause allowing Congress to override that vote. In April 2002, the Governor of Nevada, Kenny Guinn, issued a veto of Yucca Mountain, adding to several lawsuits that had already been filed by the state. In response, on May 8, 2002, the federal House of Representatives overrode the Nevada veto, with the Senate following suit 60–39 on July 9, 2002. The resulting stalemate lasted another decade.

In 2010, the Obama administration decided to halt funding for Yucca Mountain. In its place, Obama appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission for America’s Nuclear Future (BRC), composed of nuclear experts and administrators. The BRC was tasked to meet with communities, listen to their experiences with nuclear waste management, and recommend new processes and ways of managing waste. The BRC subsequently recommended a consent-based siting process for community inclusion in nuclear waste siting decisions.⁠12

In 2012, the Nye County Board of Commissioners sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, reiterating their consent for Yucca Mountain and arguing that the economic benefits of the repository were necessary for their communities to thrive.⁠13 This letter elicited a quick response from the Governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval, who restated Nevada’s opposition to the project and reminded the DOE that Nye County cannot authoritatively speak to the views of the state or of all Nevadans.⁠14 Stalemate continued.

Between 2012 and 2022, little action was taken either to abandon or move forward with YMP, rendering the site effectively inoperative. Although the Trump administration briefly reopened discussion of Yucca Mountain in 2017, meaningful action was stalled by continued widespread public opposition among Nevadans in what had become by then a “swing state” in Presidential elections. Under the Biden administration, Nevada state officials filed a motion in September 2022 urging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to declare Yucca Mountain an unfeasible project with finality.⁠15 The state also launched a campaign to remind Nevadans and Americans at large about the problems with the YMP, including a website, yuccamountainproject.com, that features scientific assessments from several experts who question the suitability of the site and a ten-part podcast about issues facing the location.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: A Study in “Success”

In contrast to the YMP, the experience of Carlsbad, New Mexico illustrates a different process for nuclear waste siting, with a very different outcome. In the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which managed the nation’s nuclear weapons manufacturing and stockpile, asked the National Academy of Sciences to set up a Committee on Waste Disposal to explore possibilities for nuclear waste storage on land.⁠16 Based on geological studies, the committee’s 1957 report identified deep geologic salt basins as the most effective barrier against the escape of radioactive materials from a waste repository.⁠17 The AEC then looked for salt beds in the U.S. and ultimately approached the State of Kansas in the early 1970s, which rejected the AEC’s plan. Upon hearing of the Kansas decision, a group of local leaders from New Mexico approached the AEC in 1972 to promote the siting of a nuclear waste repository in the area around Carlsbad in the southeastern portion of the state, which contains 165-million-year-old Permian salt beds. The AEC found the site satisfactory and began negotiating with local officials. However, the state government of New Mexico rejected the idea. Instead, the state negotiated with the DOE to site what became known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). WIPP is restricted to storing radioactive waste produced during the Cold War by the Department of Defense.⁠18 It is legally forbidden to use the site for waste from the nation’s civilian nuclear power plants—hence the need for the DOE to look beyond New Mexico to Yucca Mountain or other sites.

The twenty-seven-year period from 1972 to the opening of the repository in 1999 saw a number of negotiations between the State of New Mexico and the federal government. One outcome from these processes was a novel arrangement called a consultation and cooperation agreement between the DOE and the state.⁠19 This agreement calls “for the timely and open exchange of information about WIPP” between the DOE and the State of New Mexico, establishes limits on the volume and type of waste allowable in WIPP, and defines the role of the DOE in relation to waste monitoring. The Land Withdrawal Act of 1992 formalized the transfer of the land upon which WIPP is located to the federal government, halting all other mining activity. New Mexico also used (and continues to use) lawsuits, state legislation, and an independent environmental committee (funded by DOE) to assert a limited amount of influence on the development and operation of WIPP.⁠20 Local politicians, business leaders, and safety experts were in favor of the project, and were treated as local experts by the DOE, which created a sense of trust with the operators of the WIPP facility.⁠21 The process of siting and opening WIPP is held up by the DOE as a success story and, as of 2023, it was the only permanent geologic repository for radioactive waste in the world—though Finland is expected to open a deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel in 2026.

After the termination of funding for Yucca Mountain, calls for expanding WIPP to store commercial nuclear waste have increased, but the State of New Mexico continues to resist these proposals, which fall outside the scope of the original agreement between federal agencies and the state. There is local support in Carlsbad for the expansion, as the current economic benefits from WIPP will diminish when the site starts to wind down its acceptance of military waste and closes, leaving remote monitoring as the sole economic activity.⁠22 While WIPP may qualify as a success for many in support of geologic repositories, its legacy is complicated, as it is a unique facility for noncommercial waste. Whether WIPP can be a model for future repositories is questionable, but it undoubtedly offers much to think about for communities and states considering a nuclear waste site, both today and for the far future.

Notes

A Guide to Community Participation in Nuclear Siting Processes

Nafeesa Irshad and Clark A. Miller

In 2012, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, appointed by President Barack Obama, recommended that the United States government adopt a “consent-based approach” to siting future nuclear waste repositories.⁠1 The commission used the language of “consent-based siting” to describe a process in which potential host communities (that is, communities being asked to consider the construction of a future storage facility for nuclear waste within their jurisdiction) would need to agree before the government could evaluate, design, or build a facility. After the initial agreement, communities would also be granted an active role in the ensuing evaluation process. Following this recommendation, in 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a comprehensive report describing their intended approach to communities, Consent-Based Siting Processes for Federal Consolidated Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel.⁠2

The 2023 report provided a multi-phase roadmap for future DOE siting of a nuclear waste storage facility in which the community plays an active and collaborative role in the siting process. At the same time, the report acknowledged that, for community participation to be meaningful, communities might want the process to include activities and elements in addition to or different from those mapped out by DOE. Therefore, the report indicates that some flexibility may be possible in how the process responds to local geography, culture, or needs for time and consideration. More recently, DOE changed the name of its approach to “collaboration-based siting” in the first half of 2025, signaling that some aspects of the process laid out in the 2023 report may change. Communities will thus need to be vigilant and well-versed in terms of knowledge about any future nuclear siting effort, the various institutional actors involved and their roles, risks to human health and the environment, and present and future long-term benefits. Of particular importance will be whether—and at which points in the process—a potential host community is still empowered to say “no” and how that decision, if allowed, is to be formulated by the community.

Another important element of the siting process that communities will wish to know and consider is whether the facility being proposed is an interim facility, meant to store the waste for a temporary period, perhaps up to one hundred years, or a permanent facility, meant to store the waste for ten thousand years or more. At its termination, an interim facility would be closed by removing the waste and taking it elsewhere. By contrast, at its termination, a permanent facility would be permanently sealed with the waste inside. While the broad ideas about community participation discussed in this chapter generally apply to the siting of both interim and permanent facilities, the 2023 DOE report and roadmap were specifically meant to cover interim facilities.

In this chapter, we present an outline of the process laid out in the 2023 DOE roadmap, which at least for the moment remains the most recent guide for interim nuclear waste facility siting. We explain what this process expects of potential host communities during each of its phases, and we identify some of the questions that communities may want to ask during each phase. Before doing that, we review the idea of consent that informed the Blue Ribbon Commission and 2023 DOE report, as a background for communities that may be helpful.

What Does Consent Mean?

The 2023 report explicitly refuses to define consent because it could mean different things for different communities. Since the DOE has subsequently altered its program to “collaboration-based siting,” one of the most important things for the community to do early on is to understand exactly what collaboration means: in other words, what rights and opportunities the community will have to participate in and contribute to the siting process, what their relationship will be to the DOE and other participating actors, and how community members intend to inform the process with local culture and values, as well as with a vision of who the community is and what the members want the community to be in the future.

A helpful definition of consent in this context, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “compliance in or approval of what is done or proposed by another.”⁠3 As defined in the Blue Ribbon Commission report, a consent-based process would be one in which approval is sought by the federal government from a host community to site a facility within their jurisdiction. The Blue Ribbon Commission emphasizes developing a trust relationship with potential host communities; collaborating with them to explore and evaluate potential nuclear storage facility sites; ensuring that the process is fair, equitable, and just; providing funding for communities to actively participate in the process of defining the criteria for site selection and evaluating sites against those criteria; and prioritizing the needs of the community.

The Blue Ribbon Commission’s idea of consent is based on the notion of “informed consent” in medicine, with which the community may be more familiar.⁠4 In informed consent, a doctor seeks a patient’s formal approval before undertaking a medical procedure. In this case, consent is obtained to protect the interests and rights of individuals. The doctor is not allowed to carry out the procedure unless the patient agrees ahead of time. In turn, the requirement that the consent be informed ensures that people undergoing treatment or participating in a research project are fully aware of the potential outcomes or results, positive and negative, and can use the information to make a well-thought-out decision. In medicine, the important components of consent are disclosure, comprehension, voluntariness, and competence.⁠5 Disclosure involves providing complete information about the treatment or research, including its potential risks, burdens, and benefits. Comprehension involves making sure that participants fully understand the information provided. Consent must also be a voluntary act without any influence from the doctor. Finally, participants must be competent, able to understand the information provided and use it to make an informed decision, giving special considerations for people with reduced mental capacities—for instance, because of age or mental-health challenges.

Community participation in a nuclear waste siting process can be similarly informed. Key ideas will need to be adapted, however, because a community is involved, rather than just an individual.⁠6

Adapted for nuclear facility siting, the idea of informed consent suggests that potential host communities would need to become fully knowledgeable about what it means to have a nuclear waste facility located in their jurisdiction before providing their input into a decision about whether or not to host that facility. Already, here, we can see the need for adaptation: What does it mean for a community to have sufficient knowledge to make an informed decision? For example, must all community members fully understand the risks of nuclear waste? If not, who needs to know, and what do they need to know and understand? Similarly, how will the community be allowed to provide input into the decision to site the facility? Will the community vote on the decision? Or will they be given some other means of contributing? If a vote, will it require a majority, a super-majority, or even a complete consensus? These are tough questions, and community members will need to work them out among themselves and with local, state, and federal officials through comprehensive discussions and agreement.

Disclosure⁠7 would mean the provision of information about the risks, burdens, and benefits of hosting a nuclear waste facility by the U.S. government and other potential participants, such as the nuclear industry. This could include the amounts and types of waste to be stored, the expected timetable of storage and operation of the facility, the means of storage, evidence that supports the conclusion that those means are safe, and any known risks that the community will face. The community may also wish to know other things, as well, such as what the facility will look like, how it will work, how many employees will work there, doing what kinds of jobs, and how the facility will be governed and managed. It will be important for the community to become familiar with the anticipated siting processes, so that they can develop strategies for meaningful participation across the different phases. The community could request disclosure of these kinds of information, as well as additional information that community members are interested in reviewing. In medicine, patients are allowed to ask questions of their doctors, and doctors are expected to try their best to answer them. Thus, disclosure is not necessarily a one-time event whose scope is defined or delimited, but rather could be an ongoing dialogue in which the community is allowed to ask questions and expect that they be given information to answer them, within the limits of current expert knowledge. In the end, the success of a collaborative siting process will depend on ethical, two-way communication, based on principles of fairness, honesty, respect, integrity, transparency, and respecting privacy, from both sides.

In medical informed consent, disclosure goes hand-in-hand with comprehension.⁠8 Comprehension means ensuring not only that community members have substantial information available to them, but also that they are able to understand the information and what it means. It seems reasonable to expect, for example, that information be disclosed publicly, so that anyone in the community can access and learn about it. If they wish, the community should also be enabled to bring in others, such as independent experts, to help them understand the risks, benefits, and burdens. In medicine, for example, one might get a second opinion on whether a medical procedure is needed, whether it’s likely to be beneficial, and whether the risks involved are unduly onerous. Or a patient might consult online resources to better understand information presented by the doctor about the risks and benefits of the procedure. The potential host community will need sufficient time to acquire and understand substantial amounts of information. Equitable involvement of community members in information disclosure, along with access to experts, will also be important in order to make sure that all participants are informed.

The principles of medical consent stipulate that consent is voluntary, which in this case would mean that the community is voluntarily or freely participating in the project—that they are not subject to undue influence from those seeking their approval. Questions of voluntariness might arise, for example, if the government were offering significant benefits in exchange for siting the facility; if the community were facing economic risks, such as the closure of a factory or power plant that provides substantial community jobs or revenues; or if the government were pressuring the community to accept. To guard against undue influence, the community might want to come together ahead of time, before the process begins, to discuss community goals and values, concerns, and questions, as well as how they would like to see the process proceed—including whether they wish to delegate negotiation or decision-making authority to one or more people (for instance, a city council or mayor) or establish how they propose for the community to arrive at a siting decision (for example, by majority vote). Such discussions, especially if broadly inclusive of the community’s members, would help the community navigate the process and put them in better position to voice their questions, values, concerns, and perspectives in their deliberations and negotiations with those proposing the site.

The final principle of medical informed consent is competence. We think the relevant analogy for communities is capabilities. Does the community have the capabilities to learn the information provided to them, make sense of that information, apply it to their own context and circumstances, and then make a reasoned decision, as a community, whether or not to go forward with the facility siting? This is, in part, about knowledge and skills. As we suggested above, does the community have among its members the expertise to understand, communicate, and deliberate about the information provided by the government—or can they access this expertise through other means, like independent experts consulting with the community? The question of capabilities is also about empowerment. What needs to happen for the community to be sufficiently empowered to do the work of making a decision and taking on the responsibilities of living with nuclear waste? The 2023 DOE report on consent-based siting highlights the importance of community empowerment as a core component of siting a nuclear waste facility, as well as the need to provide resources to support that empowerment.

Actively Acquiring Knowledge and Information to Support Participation

Knowledge acquisition by the community is key to their informed participation in the siting process. As we noted above, government disclosure of information about a proposed nuclear waste storage facility and its associated risks will be an important element of community learning. However, in many cases, communities will want to know more than what is initially disclosed, and this will require further seeking out, organizing, and sharing of information. As we will describe in more detail below, the 2023 DOE report on consent-based siting acknowledges that communities will want to pursue additional knowledge and suggests both providing resources for the community to acquire it and also organizing government assessments of prospective sites to develop relevant knowledge. The community may want to set up a formal mechanism, such as a community committee, to be responsible for understanding what matters to the community, asking relevant questions, identifying and bringing in outside experts, and processing the information and insights that come back in an appropriate form for communicating to other community members and groups.

Risk information offers an example of how communities might want to pursue knowledge as part of the siting process.⁠9 In processes for siting nuclear projects, communities are frequently concerned about risks. This can include risks to their natural environment, including land, soil, water, landscape, and climate; risks to individual health; and risks to the community’s culture, economy, infrastructure, and social fabric. Some of this information will be generic; for example, what might happen to people’s health if they are accidentally exposed to radioactive materials? But other information will need to be tailored to the specific context of the community. Are there, for example, locally important environmental sites, such as a wildlife refuge, that should be given special attention in risk assessments? Similarly, who in the community is particularly vulnerable to risks, and how will their vulnerabilities be accounted for in risk assessments? Communities will likely want to know not only what risks exist, but also how the government and site operators plan to manage those risks, both on an everyday basis and in the case of emergencies. What safety and security protocols will be used? How will these protocols be updated as information on risks evolves over the life of the facility? What will happen when the facility closes? How will the facility make ongoing updates about risks available, accessible, and comprehensible to the community, and will such information be available to all community members? How, if at all, will the community be involved in oversight and governance of risks on an ongoing basis? Only by comprehensively seeking out a rich array of information will the community fully understand the risks of the site and improve their ability to collaboratively design the facility to minimize those risks and ensure that they are properly managed, in accordance with community values, standards, and concerns.

Other questions that may be of interest to potential host communities could include: What are the experiences of different communities with nuclear siting projects? What kinds of effects could a nuclear project have on land, water, soil, agriculture, plants and animals, human health and well-being, culture, and climate, both in the present and in the future? What risk management strategies would be put into place to preserve the natural, social, and built environment of the community? How will processes of transparency and accountability be designed and work over the lifetime of the project? How will the project implementers (probably either a government agency or a private-sector firm, or firms, contracting with or acting on behalf of the government) create and keep continuous engagement with the community throughout the project’s lifetime? Is community participation a one-time event, or will the design and management of the facility support iterative engagement from existing community members as well as future generations?

The Community’s Roles in the Phases of the Siting Process

The 2023 DOE report on consent-based siting proposes that siting take place through a series of phases. Although DOE changed the name of its approach to “collaboration-based siting” in 2025, as of the time of our writing, they have not yet signaled substantive changes in their overall approach to siting. Communities participating in siting processes should be vigilant about whether future policy changes and updates fundamentally alter the process laid out below and, if so, how.

The 2023 report maps out three broad stages of the siting process, each of which includes multiple phases. We describe each of these phases below. We have also created a table, which is available online at https://csi.asu.edu/supplementary/#community; drawing on the DOE report, that table summarizes each phase, lists the activities that DOE anticipates taking during the phase, and makes a few suggestions for communities to consider, in terms of activities they may wish to undertake during the phase.

Stage 1. Planning and Capacity Building

Phase 1. Planning and capacity building (2-3 years):

After the DOE acquires authorization and funding to commence a siting process (Phase 1A), DOE will begin working with communities to build their capabilities to participate effectively in siting (Phase 1B). This will include robust community engagement, information sharing, and relationship building with communities. The government will provide resources and funding to communities to participate in this phase, to enable them to equip themselves with knowledge about spent nuclear fuel and past siting processes and to consider how those might interact with community values and visions of the future, as well as to begin consideration of how the community and its leadership see participation and decision-making taking place during future phases. At this point, the process will be open to any community that the government is considering or who independently considers themselves as a potential site for a future nuclear waste storage facility.

Stage 2. Site Screening and Assessment

Phase 2. Site selection and development of site evaluation criteria (1-2 years):

This phase starts with DOE issuing a list of criteria for screening and conducting preliminary assessments of potential sites for future nuclear waste storage facilities. Participating communities will be encouraged to use these criteria to see if they qualify to be a potential host. Communities will also be encouraged to develop additional criteria, grounded for example in community values, culture, or geography, that they see as important for including in any assessment of potential sites for future facilities. The 2023 report envisions that interested communities would be eligible to apply for funding during this phase to take part in evaluation of the screening criteria, and to develop their own additional criteria for inclusion in the evaluation process.

Phase 3. Preliminary site assessment (1-2 years):

Interested and qualified communities may choose during this phase to participate in the preliminary assessment of potential sites for a future nuclear waste storage facility, based on the criteria developed by the community and DOE in Phase 2. During this phase, communities are able to ask initial questions about community well-being and economic development; benefits and risks to community health, culture, economy, or the environment; facility design, safety, and other features; the amount and sources of spent nuclear fuel to be stored in the facility; and plans for safely transporting spent nuclear fuel to the storage site. Communities are also able to ask questions about the ongoing siting process and how it will proceed.

Phase 4. Comprehensive technical and environmental review (2-3 years):

DOE will carry out a comprehensive technical and environmental review of the location or locations that pass the preliminary assessment in Phase 3. Another funding opportunity will provide interested communities with resources to participate in the review of technical and environmental factors for the sites. The community could request additional funding to hire experts to conduct independent assessments if they consider them important. Data from this phase will inform the design of the facility and other legal requirements. Participating communities can get more detailed answers to their questions on community well-being, facility technical design and features, and risks and burdens to the community. They will also need to finalize their plans for how they will formulate and inform DOE about their views of whether the community is a good fit to host a potential facility, or whether they wish to withdraw from consideration.

Stage 3. Negotiation and Implementation

Phase 5. Site selection (1 year):

During this phase, the federal government will select one or more sites as final candidates to host a possible future nuclear waste storage facility. Selected communities will be given another opportunity to apply for funding to participate in proposing and drafting terms and conditions for hosting the facility, and for subsequent negotiations with DOE. This stage includes finalizing the amounts and types of spent nuclear fuel that can be accepted at the storage site or sites, and may include additional information such as emergency response protocols, additional regulatory requirements, terms for governance and oversight, monitoring and reporting environmental impacts during the construction and operation of the facility, modes of facility operation, conditions and performance metrics, economic development commitments, access to information, communication and reporting commitments, non-federal co-oversight options, and terms for continued engagement and dialogue, as well as processes for community collaboration, engagement, and decision-making throughout the lifetime of the facility. The community and DOE discuss, collaborate, and negotiate to achieve and ratify a workable durable agreement to guide facility development and governance. The community could also request support to access and hire independent legal expertise to facilitate the negotiation and the process of drafting terms and conditions.

Phase 6. Implementation (Phase 6A, 3-4 years, and 6B, long-term):

During these phases, the DOE will license and construct a nuclear waste storage facility in one or more communities in which they have reached agreement, and then operate the facility or facilities until closure and decommissioning. The timelines for construction, opening, operation, closing, and decommissioning will be guided by the agreements negotiated in Phase 5, and these agreements will also govern the relationships among the community, DOE, and other participants. Community engagement and oversight, for example, may be an important aspect of this phase, so that the community can ensure that commitments are maintained and upheld throughout the construction, operation, and closure of the facility. The community may also have concerns about how spent nuclear fuel is transported to the site. Although this phase occurs after agreements are formalized, ongoing involvement in the site and in key decisions could be something the community wants to include in its agreement, enabling the community to continue a collaborative relationship with the facility and its owners, managers, and regulators throughout construction and operation.

Notes

The Discount Rate: A Number to Know

Christopher F. Jones

This book is about imagining the future of your community and using what you imagine to inform decisions that will profoundly shape your community’s future.

But exactly how much weight should you give to the future you imagine? Compared to today’s situation, should you weigh potential future outcomes—good or bad—a lot? Only a little? Somewhere in between?

It’s a tough question. Give too much weight to the potential future risks of a nuclear waste spill, and you might miss out on an important economic opportunity that could bring jobs and prosperity to your community. Give those risks too little weight, however, and you could end up sacrificing your community’s health, environment, and economy.

To make things worse, this essential value judgment—how important is the future, to you, relative to the present—is often camouflaged or hidden in technical assumptions used to calculate scientific and economic risks and benefits.

This essay is about one such assumption, the discount rate, and how it can influence whether or not the future gets accounted for properly in decisions such as whether or not to host a future nuclear waste facility.

We live in a world where economic numbers are important factors in our lives. Some of these are well known and reported regularly by news outlets: the daily shifts in stock markets, the unemployment rate, and the rate of economic growth, usually measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But many numbers lurk beneath the surface, where they exert a powerful influence while mostly escaping attention. Little embodies this truth better than the discount rate.

A discount rate is a simple concept, but it has major ramifications. It’s basically a measure of how much to value the future relative to the present. A high discount rate means that we discount (disregard) the future a lot. Essentially, anything that might happen far in the future gets ignored. A low discount rate, by contrast, treats the future as closer in value to the present (although still worth less), which means that things we imagine happening decades from now still matter for decision-making.⁠1

The discount rate can thus be thought of as the inverse of a more familiar concept: the interest rate. In banking, an interest rate determines how much return one gets on a deposit. Put $100 in a bank at a 2 percent compounded interest rate and it will be worth $165 after twenty-five years. If that interest rate is 5 percent, it will be worth $348, and at 10 percent, it will be worth $1,205. Small shifts in the interest rate have big effects down the road.

The same concept applies to discount rates. Instead of asking how much money can grow over time, a discount rate is used to assess how much money today is likely to be worth in the future. The core idea is that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future, and the value of today’s money should therefore be discounted. If a person wanted to have $1,000 in twenty-five years, the discount rate tells them how much they should put aside today. With a discount rate of 2 percent, it is necessary to put aside $610 in the present. But with a discount rate of 5 percent, the amount drops to $295, and at 10 percent, it is only $92. Or, if you think about it the other way around, with a 10 percent discount rate, you would value receiving $92 today just as much as you’d value getting $1,000 in twenty-five years.

An example from baseball illustrates this logic. July 1 is known to some as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” In 2000, the New York Mets slugger had a contract for $5.9 million, but could no longer earn a roster spot. So the team made a unique deal. They would pay him nothing for ten years. Then they would pay him more than $1 million plus interest every July 1 from 2011 through 2035, allowing him to net over $30 million in total. The Mets management reasoned that if they invested that $5.9 million in 2000 with Bernie Madoff’s advice, they would come out ahead.⁠2 They were, in short, discounting the future value of money. They put a higher value and greater importance on having $5.9 million today than on having $30 million in the future.

Communities considering hosting a nuclear waste repository may be asked to consider a variety of issues that involve weighing present and future benefits, costs, or risks. For example, they may have the chance to receive up-front benefits or get larger benefit streams in the future. Or they may be asked to consider how large of an emergency fund they want created, today, to help pay for dealing with a potential nuclear waste accident in the future.

In assessing these questions, communities may find it useful to understand what discount rates are, how they are set, and how this may affect the benefits and costs they face. This matters because applying a high, low, or medium discount rate to assessments of risk and value can have an enormous impact on the financial benefits a community will receive, or the levels of risk or harm the community may be exposed to. At the same time, there are many reasons to think that the standard ways discount rates are calculated by economists and policymakers do not align with community values. Being aware of these dynamics can help communities to better assess the current and potential future value of benefit packages related to hosting a repository, to think more carefully about how to weigh potential risks over a long time period, and hopefully to negotiate for improved outcomes that suit the community’s unique needs and priorities.

The Logic of Discounting

Why discount the future at all? Economists generally offer three reasons why it makes sense to think a dollar today is worth more than it will be in the future. First, there is the benefit of immediate satisfaction versus delayed gratification: a bird in the hand versus two in the bush. All things being equal, most people prefer having something now rather than waiting for the future. If there is a new television you want, getting it now versus in a year will give you more time to enjoy it. Second, there is the issue of uncertainty. If you’re seeking a particular item of clothing, it may be sold out in six months, or may no longer be available if the designer moves on to new styles. Our own futures are also uncertain: there is no guarantee we will even be alive and healthy in a year or two, or in twenty or thirty years, so satisfying our desires now is preferable to waiting. Third, there is the assumption that because of economic growth, we will be richer in the future and the purchasing power of a dollar will decline. Consider that the average price of a new car has increased from $5,000 in 1975 to $22,000 in 2000 to more than $48,000 in 2025.⁠3 With $35,000 today, you have many choices for vehicles, but in ten years, that may not be the case.

Because of these reasons, policymakers frequently use discount rates to help them assess whether policies that affect the distant future have a favorable cost-benefit ratio. Does it make sense to add a lane to an expressway in a city, in the hope that it will drive economic growth? The answer depends, in part, on how much people have to pay, today, for the benefits that accrue down the road. Another type of policy question concerns how much it makes sense to invest today to avoid damages down the road, such as those related to climate change. Most people agree that it makes sense to protect future generations, but if our grandchildren are likely to be richer than us, then maybe it is okay to expect them to pay for some of the damages. Discount rates offer a way to quantify how much of a burden should be borne today versus left to the future.

Nuclear waste repositories, because they are intended to operate for many decades with costs and benefits that extend far into the future, are likely to include policies with discount rates. These are likely to occur on the front end and the back end. At the time of siting a repository, it is possible that communities will be able to negotiate for some investments in infrastructure, education, or the local economy—for instance, siting processes for nuclear storage facilities in Finland and Sweden have involved incentives for nearby “host” communities.⁠4

Decisions about whether such benefits should be invested up front or deferred over time may depend on calculations using a discount rate. And at the closing of a repository (if it is a long-term “interim” facility rather than a permanent one), there is likely to be significant environmental remediation. Imagine that the repository will close in fifty years, and the environmental work will cost a million dollars (it will undoubtedly be much higher, but that’s an easy number to work with). If policymakers use a low discount rate of 1.4 percent, it justifies allocating nearly $500,000 today to cover these future costs. But if they calculate the initial investment with a discount rate of 5.5 percent, it is worth spending less than $70,000 today, and at a rate of 10 percent, the number drops to below $10,000. In this manner, the choice of a discount rate has a large impact on how much risk and benefit communities will experience in the present and the future, and how much investment will prioritize preparedness and preventative measures, versus deferring action for decades, perhaps even centuries.

The Limitations of Discounting

Why are there so many possible discount rates? How are they calculated, and how do economists, policymakers, and institutions decide which rate to use? Most economists and policymakers seek to follow some existing market measure, such as the rate of interest, the cost of borrowing money, or the average rate of return on capital. Over the past several decades, rates have varied from 3 percent to 10 percent as these market measures have fluctuated, with rates of 5 to 8 percent being a common choice. The significant rise in interest rates since 2022 has pushed the average discount rate higher in recent years, meaning that policymakers are likely to assume that lower levels of investment in the present are warranted.

The primary benefit of using market measures like the interest rate is that economists and policymakers can argue that they are a value-neutral guidepost. If interest rates derive from market forces and open competition, then the decision-maker is simply responding to the free choices made by individuals across billions of transactions. Therefore, policymakers are most likely to use a measure that is in line with prevailing interest rates as a default option.

There are several reasons, however, that market measures have biases that render them inappropriate for long-term decision-making, particularly when questions of the environment and future generations are concerned. Given that both of these factors are in play with nuclear waste repositories, communities may have a compelling case to advocate for the use of lower discount rates, which would usually translate into more up-front payments and investments.

Consider the environment. Market systems rarely account for environmental damage. Companies are not charged for emitting carbon dioxide into the air or reducing biodiversity, nor does the loss of wilderness spaces or undetected contamination appear in balance sheets. If environmental damage is largely excluded from market systems, why should we trust that a measure derived from financial markets is capable of safeguarding natural systems?

Moreover, discount rates assume that the future will be more abundant than the present: more money, more technology, more ideas. This may be true of the financial system—it’s debatable—but the same logic does not hold for environmental systems. Getting richer will not mean that there are more beautiful wilderness areas to preserve. More technology cannot regrow a glacier that has melted. Environmental goods, in short, tend to become more scarce over time, rather than more abundant, and their restoration operates over decades or centuries, not months or years.

Inheritance decisions also reveal that when many people think about the world they want to leave for their grandchildren, they discount the future much less than market rates. We know this by looking at how many people plan their estates to provide for future generations, often sacrificing their own desires in the present for the benefit of their heirs. Even if they do not know the concept of a discount rate, their actions reveal that they value the future nearly as much as they value the present. This may be irrational to an economist, but it reflects ethical values many people have that suggest it is appropriate to act now to leave a better future to others, and not just assume that since they are projected to be wealthier (according to currently prevailing assumptions and models), things will work out for them.

So, there is a major divide between how economists and policymakers assess the future, and how most people do when they think about environmental protection or the welfare of future generations. Economists and policymakers tend to favor high discount rates, on the assumption that the world will continue to get better and richer. Everyday people usually make much more cautious decisions that place a higher value on the future, demonstrating that they prefer lower discount rates.

These tensions can be seen in how today’s leading environmental economist discusses the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS). If the GIS melts completely, it will raise sea levels around the globe by seven meters, effectively submerging many of the world’s most populous areas. William Nordhaus asked in 2019 if it made sense to take additional action today to prevent this possibility. His conclusion was no. At a 5 percent discount rate, the benefits of saving the GIS were so far in the future that present-day actions were inefficient.⁠5 Communities should debate whether they agree with this economist’s logic; if they do not, it likely means that they favor the use of lower discount rates.

That’s why this book focuses on imagining the future. If the future really matters to people, then we believe it would aid them to better understand what the future might look like. After all, they already know what the present looks like. How can they weight present and future properly without being able to peer into the latter, even with clouded glasses?

Takeaways

What might members of a community considering a nuclear waste repository do with this information? The first thing is to ask policymakers about what discount rates are being used when calculating the future costs and benefits of the proposed repository and policies that go with it, like benefits packages, environmental remediation funds, and so forth. Second, community members can engage in dialogue with one another and with policymakers about whether the proposed rates reflect their values. It may be the case that using discount rates that are lower than market measures is a more appropriate approach for responsibly implementing a nuclear waste repository that has long-term impacts on the natural world and for future generations.

Ultimately, these technical discussions about discount rates are really questions about how people value the future, and what type of world is being left for a community’s grandchildren (and great-grandchildren, and on and on). High discount rates offer an optimistic view that the world will be a richer and better place where future generations are wealthier and have better access to technology than we do to clean up our mistakes. Low discount rates argue for a more precautionary approach that seeks to take more action now to place a lower burden on the future. Communities should engage in clear discussions about what type of vision of the future they believe best reflects their collective values, and then insist that policymakers work with them on setting discount rates that reflect that decision.

It’s your community; it should be your discount rate.

Further Reading

For a helpful (and humorous!) overview of discount rates, see David Roberts, “Discount Rates: A Boring Thing You Should Know About (with Otters!),” Grist, September 24, 2012, https://grist.org/article/discount-rates-a-boring-thing-you-should-know-about-with-otters.

Another overview of discount rates and their use in policy, “Discounting 101,” comes from the think tank Resources for the Future: https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/discounting-101.

Notes

Environmental Injustice in Nuclear Waste Siting Processes

Myrriah Gómez

The United States has historically ignored the perspectives of frontline communities when it comes to siting nuclear waste repositories. This is no different than the history of other nuclear sites in the country. Siting processes related to activities ranging from uranium mining, weapons development, and weapons testing to the establishment of nuclear reactors and high-level waste facilities have consistently omitted Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). This history lays the foundation for future efforts to site interim or permanent nuclear waste repositories and other nuclear facilities in the United States.

There’s a book I really like called Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148.⁠1 It’s a science fiction novella that’s set both on the Moon and in an imagined space within the United States called the Cali-Texas Reservation. In this fictitious setting, oil deposits are depleted, and humans turn entirely to nuclear energy to power the Earth. Sometime before the year 2070, nuclear industrialists achieve total global domination, but then something really devastating happens: they run out of places to store the high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel that commercial nuclear reactors create as byproducts from energy-producing reactions. The residents of the reservation(s) become lunar braceros, responsible for developing underground deposit sites on the Moon to bury nuclear waste.

This complex narrative reframes past historical events as repeating themselves in a futuristic setting. In the process, the novella confronts the intersecting issues of racism, colonialism, and neoliberalism that have historically beset nuclear decision-making in the United States. In the Cali-Texas reservation (and other reservations in the novel), the government keeps the poorest people under watch, deregulates capital, and implements forced labor for survival, leaving few to no opportunities for people born into the reservation to leave. When the mixed-race people who grew up on the reservation think they have found a way to escape the system of exploitation by helping deliver nuclear waste to the Moon, they discover instead that they are also considered part of the waste, and that the government has been literally disposing of former Moon techs (“tecos”) on the Moon along with the nuclear waste. The deliberate killing of these skilled-but-poor BIPOC workers is built into the project of lunar nuclear waste disposal.

The idea that the world is running out of space to permanently dispose of nuclear waste on Earth is a fictional conceit of Lunar Braceros, but one with a real-world point. Today, countries around the world are only beginning to dispose of spent fuel, yet they are already struggling to find places to build facilities to store this waste. The United States lacks any plan for permanently storing its own high-level nuclear waste. Currently, existing spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. is being stored in more than thirty states at ninety-four operating reactors and forty-two closed reactors.⁠2 The waste sits in steel-lined concrete pools or steel-and-concrete casks. Additional nuclear waste includes spent fuel from powering the U.S. Navy’s operational fleet of nuclear ships and submarines, high-level waste from nuclear weapons production, and waste from a variety of other sources, such as uranium mining. In fact, more waste is being produced each year from military sources than from commercial sources: 2,400 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM) of military waste versus 2,000 MTHM of commercial waste. This is important to note, since the current proposals for interim waste storage from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) only incorporate spent fuel waste from commercial reactors. The rest of the waste is not discussed.

The dilemma of where and how to store nuclear waste evolves from the original governing document for managing it: the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. The NWPA, as amended, allows DOE to “negotiate an agreement with a host community, and design and seek a license for an interim storage facility.”⁠3 As of now, these so-called “interim” facilities, which are anticipated to be located in one or more undetermined “host communities” within the U.S., would store commercial⁠4 spent fuel waste until a final, permanent repository is built, at which time the waste would be moved again to the repository, where it would remain indefinitely. However, in the absence of a permanent repository, and with no existing plan to build one in the United States, these interim storage facilities become de facto permanent facilities. And yet, the prospective host communities would be asked to consent only to housing an interim facility for a set number of years.⁠5

In the context of high-level nuclear waste facilities, what does it mean for a community to consent? In a 2023 report, DOE defines consent-based siting as “an approach to siting facilities that prioritizes the participation and needs of people and communities and seeks their willing and informed consent to accept a project in their community.”⁠6 But what does “informed consent” actually mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines consent as “permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.” Informed consent, in turn, is a type of consent that often occurs in scientific research, most notably in medicine. Informed consent refers to a process through which a party gives permission to another party to engage them in a procedure or other event after said party receives the facts about the procedure or event in question, including information about implications and future consequences. This means that any potential risks must be discussed, and informed consent places substantial responsibility on the source of the procedure or event to be transparent and educational. It also raises important questions about the consenting party, especially in the context of community consent. How is a community defined? Does consent need to be a unanimous or majority decision? What happens if it is a trial procedure and there are unintended or unexpected outcomes? These are not trivial questions in the case of siting nuclear facilities. In fact, there is a long history in the U.S. of nuclear siting decisions involving communities who were unwilling or uninformed of potential hazardous outcomes.

Currently, DOE states that it does not have a standard definition for “informed consent.” Instead, DOE states that its approach to consent-based siting will involve “active consultation, dialogue, and engagement between DOE and affected parties, including Tribes, states, and regional and local governmental entities.”⁠7 If we combine our operating definition of consent with this statement, we should expect that the states and communities through which the nuclear waste would be transported would also be included as affected parties and stakeholders, in addition to the community in which the facility would be located. In 2012, the Navajo Nation, a sovereign tribal government, passed the Radioactive and Related Substances, Equipment, Vehicles, Persons, and Materials Transportation Act of 2012.⁠8 The act, as amended, forbids high-level nuclear waste, including commercial spent fuel, from being transported across Navajo Nation. This act was passed in large part due to the detrimental effects of nuclear colonialism on the Navajo Nation, including the disproportionate mining of uranium and abandonment of uranium waste from mining, milling, processing, and transporting of uranium and uranium byproducts on or across Navajo lands. DOE does not include uranium waste among its categories of nuclear waste to be disposed of in a permanent repository, despite the harmful ionizing radiation emitted by this type of waste. Instead, regulation of radioactive mining waste is the responsibility of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there are still 523 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation.⁠9

The harmful and disproportionate effects of the uranium industry on the Navajo Nation and the subsequent transportation law, as well as another law that prevents the establishment of new uranium mines on Navajo Nation,⁠10 serve as a prime example of the challenges of environmental justice. The DOE’s consent-based citing process lists environmental justice as a particular concern, even as it carefully compartmentalizes commercial spent fuel away from the nuclear waste produced by mining and processing the uranium that is used to produce the spent fuel. The DOE states that the consent-based siting process will “pursue fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people. The process will also embrace environmental justice principles and comply with federal requirements.”⁠11 Environmental justice is one important response to environmental racism or racial discrimination in environmental policymaking. In Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.’s definition of environmental racism, he includes, in part, the “deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries.”⁠12 Historically, BIPOC communities have disproportionately experienced the negative environmental and health impacts of nuclear policy, siting, and operational decisions. In the 1940s, Indigenous (Pueblo) and Nuevomexicano peoples and lands were targeted for the siting of the Los Alamos portion of the Manhattan Project. Consequently, New Mexicans became the first downwinders of atmospheric nuclear testing. By the time scientists working under the supervision of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Los Alamos conducted the world’s first atmospheric nuclear test at the Trinity site in southern New Mexico in July 1945, they had already conducted thirty-two radioactive lanthanum experiments that released radionuclides like strontium-90 into the atmosphere.⁠13 After uranium was discovered in New Mexico’s Grants Uranium Belt in 1950, Indigenous and Nuevomexicano peoples also became the majority of the uranium mining industry’s laborers, and Indigenous homelands were poisoned by uranium mining, which continues to contaminate those communities today. These are but three examples from the first decade of nuclear colonialism in BIPOC communities, yet New Mexico continues to be targeted for the siting of a consolidated interim storage facility by the federal government.

In 1991, delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit drafted and adopted seventeen principles of environmental justice. Principle number four focuses on nuclear issues. It states: “Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisonous and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.”⁠14 DOE’s consent-based siting process has carefully isolated the conversation around high-level nuclear waste on “commercial spent fuel.” This distracts from the waste that currently exists in the form of low-level, intermediate, and the other high-level waste that was mentioned earlier, as well as the transuranic waste stored at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeastern New Mexico, Greater-Than-Class C waste,⁠15 uranium mining waste at fourteen thousand abandoned mines, and other legacy waste at facilities across the country.

The issue of spent fuel storage across New Mexico is not new to tribal communities. In 1995, Mescalero Apache tribal leader Wendell Chino signed a tentative agreement with the DOE. The agreement would have allowed the tribe, located in south central New Mexico, to open a consolidated waste interim storage facility and earn about $250 million for indefinitely storing spent nuclear fuel. Although Chino stated that the agreement did not need the full approval of the tribe, leadership decided to send the decision to a vote. Of the 1,200 tribal members eligible to vote, tribal members voted 490 in opposition to the site and 362 in favor.⁠16 Despite the vote, efforts to create an interim storage site continue, and New Mexico remains a key target.

Another interim storage site was proposed in New Mexico in 2017 by Holtec International, a multinational company that previously secured contracts for interim storage facilities on the Skull Valley Goshute reservation in Utah, at the site of the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Tennessee, and at the site of Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama, none of which were ever built. The proposed site comprises 1,040 acres in southeastern New Mexico, halfway between the cities of Carlsbad and Hobbs. Now known as the Holtec site, the proposal has split communities and peoples across the state. In 2023, the New Mexico state legislature voted against siting any interim storage facility for spent fuel in New Mexico. Despite this fact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) still voted to license the facility just a few months after New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed Senate Bill 53 into law.⁠17 A federal court decision in April 2024 upheld the New Mexico law, but a more recent Supreme Court ruling has altered the future of this facility.

On June 18, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a six to three decision in Nuclear Regulatory Commission v. Texas to approve a separate proposal by Interim Storage Partners (ISP) for an interim storage facility in west Texas, less than a mile from the New Mexico state border. This facility would be capable of holding forty thousand metric tons of spent fuel, as well as highly radioactive Greater-Than-Class-C, “low level” waste from commercial reactors. As in New Mexico, the Texas legislature and Governor Greg Abbott also passed and signed a law prohibiting the facility in Texas in 2021, but that failure to consent was blatantly ignored when the NRC licensed the facility days later. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn a decision by U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—the lower court had ruled that the NRC did not have the authority to license the Texas facility—it sets a precedent for enabling the construction of Holtec’s waste facility in New Mexico. This raises similar questions to the earlier Navajo Nation and Mescalero Apache examples: Who is considered a stakeholder, who qualifies as community, and what obligations does the federal government have to engage with, listen to, and abide by the consent decisions of affected communities? If this is how “consent-based siting” works, how will communities ever trust the federal government?

A central problem for all of these “interim” waste storage facilities is whether a permanent waste storage facility will ever actually be built in the United States. In 2010, President Barack Obama established the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future for the purpose of conducting “a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all alternatives for the storage, processing, and disposal of civilian and defense used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.”⁠18 In a report published in 2012, the commission recognizes that the NWPA allows for the construction of one consolidated interim storage facility with limited capacity, but only after a permanent repository is constructed and licensed. However, elsewhere in the report, the commission advocates for “one or more consolidated storage facilities [to] be established, independent of the schedule for opening a repository.”⁠19 Nevertheless, the NWPA has not been amended to reflect this recommendation, and the commission itself raises questions about the temporary nature of a consolidated interim storage facility by stating that “efforts to develop consolidated storage must not hamper efforts to move forward with the development of [permanent] disposal capacity.”⁠20 They clearly acknowledge that states and communities are concerned that interim storage facilities would become de facto long-term or permanent disposal sites.⁠21

The question that every community interested in entering into an agreement to site an interim storage facility in the U.S. should be asking now is: why is our community being asked to take the country’s nuclear waste—and for how long? Currently, there is no proposed site for a repository, or even a process for finding one. The U.S. government broke its own contract when it promised, initially, to remove waste from nuclear reactor sites, despite not having worked out a plan for where to put it, and they have recently placed plans for a permanent repository on hold in favor of siting interim facilities in the name of saving taxpayers’ dollars. What is the destination for the country’s nuclear power reactor waste, and when will it come? As businesses and the electric power industry begin to actively consider building more nuclear reactors, this is a question of paramount concern to communities targeted for siting interim waste storage facilities.

There is nothing “just” about the federal government asking communities to bear the burden of its mistakes, yet saying no to the federal government is especially challenging because communities might be afraid of being rejected down the road in many different kinds of decisions. In the case of places where the federal government is already heavily invested in nuclear science, like New Mexico, people worry that they will stop receiving federal funding or that their jobs will disappear. Project proposals, as in the case of interim nuclear waste storage facilities, often tout economic growth and job production, but they focus less on the unexpected outcomes or possible dangers that could result if something goes awry. Worries over issues such as the safety of transporting waste through communities to a waste facility, the possibility of interim facilities becoming de facto permanent storage sites if no waste repository is ever built, and an increase of high-level waste production from weapons manufacturing that now exceeds commercial spent fuel production give communities eighty years’ worth of reasons not to trust the federal government.

Notes