Five States Offer to Host US Nuclear Waste Under Trump’s Plan

Tennessee, Utah and three other US states are offering to take atomic waste in exchange for federal government help in spurring development of the long-dormant domestic nuclear energy sector.

The agreements with Tennessee, Utah, Louisiana, Idaho and Oklahoma represent significant progress in a decades-long effort to find a home for almost 100,000 metric tons of spent nuclear power-plant fuel.

Under the terms of the non-binding accords, the states will host Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses that would include waste sites as well as uranium enrichment, spent-fuel reprocessing and fuel fabrication. The campuses may also host advanced reactor deployment, power generation, and data centers, the Energy Department said.

“This is a new way of thinking about nuclear,” Ted Garrish, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said in an interview.

The campuses have the potential to attract up to $50 billion in private investment and generate as much as $10 billion in state and local tax revenues, the Energy Department said in a statement.

Tennessee was home to the top-secret Oak Ridge National Laboratory that enriched uranium during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project. Utah was a source of raw uranium for the program and the site of bomber training for crews that dropped the bombs on Japan on 1945.

More than 95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from US commercial reactors are piled up at sites spread in 30 states, a figure the Energy Department projects could nearly double in coming decades.

President Donald Trump’s nuclear ambitions include quadrupling US nuclear power and building 10 large new nuclear reactors.

In 1987, Congress designated a ridge in the Nevada desert about 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Las Vegas called Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste repository. But decades of political opposition have stymied the project.

“These campuses will be massive generators of economic growth, create thousands of high-paying jobs, and be crucial to unleashing America’s nuclear renaissance,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.