Members of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works on Wednesday considered a $50 billion federal plan that would fund three future nuclear innovation campuses designed to attract heavy manufacturing industries with abundant energy while also housing radioactive waste.
Testifying before the committee, Lake Barrett, chair of the American Nuclear Society Nuclear Waste Policy Task Force, urged lawmakers to overhaul the decades-old Nuclear Waste Policy Act to accommodate a new era of nuclear fuel reprocessing by civilian businesses.
“Right now, ratepayers and taxpayers are picking up about an $800 million annual drain just to temporarily store these rods,” Barrett told the committee. “This mounting liability continues to grow for every day of federal inaction, turning what should be a valuable domestic energy resource into a compounding fiscal catastrophe for hardworking Americans.”
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC) initiative, proposed in July, aims to build three regional hubs, each with data centers, advanced reactors, and commercial nuclear fuel recycling facilities. In September, the Energy Department added West Virginia to the list of states being considered as hosts for the campuses after previously signing memorandums of understanding with Tennessee, Louisiana, Utah, Oklahoma, and Idaho.
Rather than scattering the activities required to handle and process nuclear materials, the program now under development would concentrate everything in states that have agreed to store the waste in exchange for the opportunity to host the large-scale manufacturing plants expected to cluster near these regional energy hubs. The Energy Department estimates the economic impact of each hub at $10 billion in long-term local tax revenue and 25,000 jobs.
“We believe in more energy and less expensive energy,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week during a panel discussion about the huge demand for electricity needed to power the AI boom. At the Daily Caller forum on Thursday, Wright said the Department of Energy must focus entirely on boosting affordable baseload grid power rather than allowing regulatory red tape to hinder next-generation nuclear facilities.
Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is the single permanent repository of the nation’s nuclear waste under federal law, but decades of intense local opposition ultimately tied up the project in the courts and paralyzed it politically. In 2010, President Barack Obama withdrew the license and officially defunded the Yucca Mountain project.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said during the meeting Wednesday that federal policy must break its decades-long stalemate to allow the nuclear sector to expand.
“If we want to achieve true American energy dominance and power the next generation of technological innovation, we must modernize our archaic nuclear waste frameworks. We cannot allow gridlocked policies from forty years ago to act as a chokehold on the next era of domestic energy production, advanced manufacturing, and national security,” said Capito.
During the questioning, Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, maintained that the country needs more nuclear energy, but he said his state’s participation in the program is only “exploratory” until there is clarity about how federal agencies intend to observe local environmental rules and the exact terms of the final agreement.
Kathryn Huff, a University of Wisconsin professor and former Energy Department assistant secretary for nuclear energy, testified that large-scale reprocessing by civilian companies has never succeeded globally, noting that in France, Japan, and other countries the governments subsidize these activities.
“Proposals of a U.S. facility that can rely on market revenues alone for recycling should be evaluated rigorously,” Huff told lawmakers, adding that the state hubs are likely to need permanent federal guarantees to survive commercially.
Free-market advocates like Jason Isaac at the American Energy Institute maintain that intense power demand from modern data centers creates an entirely new economic model, removing the need for long-term government bailouts.
“The critical digital infrastructure buildout has changed the market completely,” Isaac said. “The technology to recycle spent fuel rods is not new, but we are reembracing it during a nuclear renaissance where private tech giants are ready to pay for affordable and reliable energy. If the federal government removes regulatory roadblocks, the private sector is fully prepared to fund these lifecycles on its own.”
Isaac contends any hesitation to move forward on establishing a national framework for nuclear storage ignores an opportunity trapped inside America’s 90,000-metric-ton spent fuel stockpile.
“The spent fuel rods we have in storage right now hold energy equivalent to about 1.2 trillion barrels of oil,” Isaac said. “If we transition to commercial recycling on these innovation campuses, we recover that valuable fuel, slash the waste’s radioactive lifespan from 100,000 years down to just 300 years, and stop that structural financial bleeding.”
