Nuclear power is key to the United States’ plans to satisfy the nation’s growing energy needs. But there’s an unresolved problem: the waste it produces. Despite plans for an ambitious new generation of nuclear reactors that could fuel AI data centers and more, a solution to storing the dangerous, long-lived refuse remains elusive.
The issue is so thorny that the Supreme Court has now weighed in. A June 18 decision allows work to move forward on a privately operated facility, to be located in Texas, that would store nuclear waste on an interim basis. The state of Texas fought the facility on the grounds that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licensed the facility, did not have the authority to issue such a license. Rather than explicitly confirming the NRC’s ability to license the facility, the court found that Texas and landowners included in the complaint did not have the legal authority to challenge the license.
The case highlights the challenges of nuclear waste storage in the United States, which has been at an impasse for many years. But other nations have recently made strides toward long-term storage solutions. “There are so many countries now making progress and much further ahead of the U.S.,” says geologist and former chair of the NRC Allison Macfarlane, director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Canada. “The U.S. is at the back of the pack.”
Here’s what to know about the status of nuclear waste in the United States and around the world.
The nuclear waste impasse
The uranium fuel that powers nuclear reactors must be regularly replaced. The old, spent fuel is dangerously radioactive, and can remain so for thousands of years, so it demands foolproof storage. Currently, the United States has over 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel, mostly contained on the sites of the nuclear reactors that produced it — over 70 locations in 35 states.
Spent fuel is initially kept in a pool of water that cools it. (The ongoing radioactive decay produces enough heat that, without cooling, the spent fuel could cause a fire.) After a few years, the radioactivity drops enough that the fuel can be moved to cylindrical containers called dry casks. “They have the spent nuclear fuel in the center of this cask and then a layer of air that can flow and circulate and cool, just through natural convection, and then you’ve got a big layer of concrete around the outside,” says nuclear engineer Riley Fisher of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “[It’s] very effective in the way that it works.”
Spent fuel from nuclear reactors is initially kept in pools of water that allow for cooling, such as this one shown in 2011 at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant in Southport, N.C.NRC/FlckrA further complication: Some of the power plants that produced the waste are no longer operating, such as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California. But, with nowhere else to go, the waste from these decommissioned plants often remains onsite, meaning the facility must still be secured and monitored by the plant’s owner. “We’ve got a whole bunch of waste at reactor sites that are … in a limbo state right now,” Fisher says.
The U.S. government is supposed to take custody of this waste. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires that the U.S. Department of Energy establish a permanent storage facility deep underground. The chosen location, selected in 1987, is Yucca Mountain, Nev. But decades of public outcry from the surrounding communities blocked progress on the facility, and funding was later cut off during the Obama administration.
The United States does store some nuclear waste underground, at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, near Carlsbad, N.M. But that facility stores only refuse from the production of nuclear weapons, not the high-level radioactive waste produced by power plants.
That has left the country without a solution as waste continues to pile up. “The U.S. has built new reactors and got them operating without solving this problem, which in my view is not terribly responsible,” Macfarlane says.
Storage in the interim
In the absence of a long-term plan, some policy makers are looking to interim storage options that could consolidate stranded fuel. The Supreme Court case was about licensing a privately operated interim storage facility that would consolidate waste, for example, from decommissioned plants. And the U.S. Department of Energy has plans for a federal interim storage facility — location TBD.
As the name suggests, an interim facility — whether private or federal — would be a temporary measure. “We’re just kicking the can down the road into the middle of the desert,” Fisher says. Experts generally agree that the best place to stuff nuclear waste for the long haul is deep underground, where its radioactivity is isolated from life on the surface. That was the goal for Yucca Mountain, which would have stored waste about 300 meters underground.
That project’s stagnation may have been partly due to the process for selecting the site. The Yucca Mountain site was selected based on factors like its geology and remote location. Buy-in from the surrounding communities wasn’t a priority. The area is home to the Western Shoshone Nation, and the land nearby has already been subject to radioactive fallout as a result of aboveground nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and ’60s at the Nevada National Security Sites. That history left Nevadans unwilling to accept a nuclear facility being foisted upon them.
Although nuclear waste storage can theoretically be accomplished with no exposure to the community, it’s not entirely without risks. An accident at WIPP in 2014 briefly released small amounts of radioactivity into the surface air and contaminated underground areas, exposing some workers to low levels of radiation.
Finding a waste land
Countries like Finland and Sweden have flipped the process for selecting a site on its head, beginning with community interest and engagement, what’s known as consent-based siting. The goal is to find a community that is willing to accept a storage facility, given such perks as jobs and economic stimulation. “You have to get a consensus — that’s not unanimity — but you have to get a consensus that people want this,” Macfarlane says. “And people do, in some places.”
Finland is on the verge of burying waste in what will become the world’s first permanent spent-fuel repository, Onkalo, in Olkiluoto. A disposal trial run with nonradioactive material is allowing for tests of safety procedures ahead of the real thing. And in January, construction began on a repository in Forsmark, Sweden. Last year, with community support, Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization selected a location near Ignace, in northwestern Ontario, to host the country’s repository.
The Onkalo repository in Finland (shown) is poised to become the first permanent disposal site for spent fuel from nuclear reactors.Courtesy of PosivaThe United States is hoping for a similar success story. The DOE’s plan for a federal interim facility will use a similar siting process to find a location.
An interim repository would be the first step. “Once we have had an interim storage facility sited and built, then DOE can move on to the question of the final repository,” says nuclear engineer Kathryn Huff of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, formerly DOE’s Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy. “I hope that we will use this proven process to site that as well.”
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