This month, President Donald Trump selected five states as candidate locations to take atomic waste. They are Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Idaho.
This is being done to help solve the United States’ issue of long-term storage for spent nuclear fuel, according to the Washington Examiner.
As President Donald Trump has pushed to quadruple domestic nuclear capacity by 2050 and rapidly expand the development of small advanced reactors and large AP1000s to meet the surging energy demand from artificial intelligence, there have been growing concerns around the amount of nuclear waste that the new projects will generate.
More than 95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from commercial reactors has piled up across the country, and the administration estimates that number could nearly double in the coming years.
For years, nuclear power plants, test reactors, and similar projects have primarily relied on temporary on-site storage for any contaminated radioactive waste material. This is largely the result of intense political opposition to the only other permanent plan put forth by the U.S. government for nuclear waste storage: Yucca Mountain.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required the Department of Energy to select a deep underground repository to store spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste. Five years later, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated as the sole location to store this atomic waste, though it took another 15 years for Congress to approve the project.
However, by 2012, the funding for Yucca Mountain was pulled, and the project was essentially canceled.
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The Trump administration is attempting to address this impasse by funding the development of Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses in several states.
Read the full story in the Washington Examiner.
