The U.S. Department of Energy announced this week that five states—Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Idaho—are being considered as hosts for Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses, sites meant to “modernize the nation’s full nuclear fuel cycle.” Federal sites to manage spent nuclear fuel—or nuclear fuel removed from a reactor—could finally break a four-decade-old problem and encourage this source of reliable, emissions-free baseload generation.
The campuses would support fuel fabrication, enrichment, reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and final disposition of used nuclear fuel. The DOE may also consider hosting advanced reactors, power generation, advanced manufacturing, and colocated data centers, “depending on state priorities and regional capabilities.” The department projects up to $50 billion in investment, generating as much as $10 billion in state and local tax revenue and nearly 25,000 jobs for the states that ultimately win the bid.
The five states selected for further consideration were whittled down from applications across 26 states—a resounding sign of interest in storing and reprocessing spent fuel. For 40 years, American nuclear waste policy has run through Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, which Congress named the country’s sole repository in 1987 over the state’s objections. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act ordered the DOE to begin collecting utilities’ spent nuclear fuel by 1998, but the department never has. In 2002, Yucca Mountain was officially selected for development as a permanent repository, but the Obama administration pulled funding for the project in 2012.
Inaction has been costly. Because the DOE hasn’t made good on this responsibility, it reimburses utilities for storage costs in cooling pools and dry casks on site. For context, the total estimated liability was $37.6 billion to $44.5 billion in 2024. And the lack of a permanent repository for spent fuel has hampered development in several states. California’s 50-year-old moratorium on new nuclear plants remains in effect until the U.S. puts a permanent waste plan into place. The DOE’s plan to establish nuclear campuses, as well as legislative changes to allow waste to be stored in locations other than Yucca Mountain, might help stop those outlays and bring nuclear power to more states.
Reprocessing will help enable new generations of advanced nuclear reactors. Conventional reactors use only about 5% of the energy in uranium, but some advanced nuclear designs run on recycled uranium and plutonium from spent fuel and burn the long-lived, radioactive byproducts of spent fuel, reducing the volume of waste for permanent storage.
None of the five states that have agreed to explore Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses are bound to anything yet, and the final disposition will still have to clear licensing. However, when states got a say in whether to take on the potential benefits and risks of these activities, 26 said yes. This is a strong contrast with the decades of resistance from Nevada, which didn’t want the project in the first place. Spent nuclear fuel is a problem that federalism can solve.