The Indian Point nuclear power plant was an energy juggernaut for 50 years, generating a quarter of the electricity that powered New York City’s iconic, glowing skyline.
It is well into its decommissioning process after shutting down in 2021: The remaining waste of the radioactive fuel that once generated all of that power has been sealed inside more than 120 hulking metal and concrete canisters.
The massive containers are welded shut and stand in rows behind barbed-wire fences, watched 24/7 by security guards carrying long guns.
This is one of several misconceptions about nuclear energy: America’s nuclear waste is not buried in a mountain or tucked at the bottom of a deep, rocky cavern. It is sealed away in coffin-like casks and spread out among more than 50 locations around the country.
Most other countries with longstanding nuclear energy programs have plans to create a permanent home for these spent fuel canisters. The US does not. Congress’s decades-old idea to bury them deep in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is long dead, and no alternative was ever identified.
Read this next: China is winning this tech race. Trump wants to throw in the towel.
That is almost entirely because Americans are by and large opposed to living anywhere near nuclear waste, and suspicious of governments’ or utilities’ attempts to assuage nuclear fears. The byproduct of nuclear energy is still associated with atomic bombs or nuclear meltdowns. In reality, what comes out of reactors is far from the dangerous, radioactive sludge seen in movies or conjured in our imaginations.
People “imagine it’s like the green drums of goo that Homer Simpson has,” said Paul Murray, the US Energy Department’s deputy assistant secretary focused on nuclear waste. The spent fuel – metal rods containing uranium pellets – are “boringly safe” when sealed correctly, Murray said.
The waste from nuclear energy poses so little danger, a person would need to stand near it for an entire year to be exposed to as much radiation “as maybe one or two X-rays,” said Brian Vangor, a waste storage supervisor at Indian Point.
But the perception of danger is a hurdle quickly becoming one of the country’s biggest obstacles to uploading a glut of climate-friendly energy onto the grid.
Nuclear start-ups – including one run by Bill Gates – are pouring billions of dollars into new-wave reactor technology. Two massive reactors recently came online in Georgia, and a burst of activity in AI has tech giants scrambling to bring plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – the site of America’s infamous nuclear meltdown – back to life.
On the threshold of America’s nuclear energy renaissance, federal officials are pleading with communities to say yes to storing spent fuel. No state has yet raised its hand to store the country’s nuclear energy waste, despite the lucrative deals it could foment. Not even temporarily.
Holtec, for example, the company that now owns the decommissioned Indian Point, is eyeing a site in New Mexico to store its spent fuel.
Officials in New Mexico – where the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bombs without telling any of the communities around it what was happening – are flat-out rejecting the idea.
“Just because we have the right geology, a low population, large land mass, does not mean that we agree to be a further sacrifice zone for the nation’s defense industry or even the power industry,” said James Kenney, secretary for New Mexico’s Environment Department.
A “political” problem
Other western countries that went all-in on nuclear energy – including Finland, Sweden, and Canada – spent years offering sweet deals to communities to host permanent repositories, either in the form of money or investments in new medical facilities, libraries, community centers or other public buildings.
The US went with a more ham-fisted approach. Congress’s decision in the late 1980s to bury the nation’s nuclear waste deep inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was done largely without consulting Nevada state officials, let alone its residents.
“The US followed the decide-announce-defend model, which is clearly a failure,” said Allison McFarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission who wrote a book on the Yucca Mountain saga.
The decision sparked a firestorm of backlash. State leaders dubbed it the “screw Nevada bill,” and fought it tooth and nail. Some scientists and state officials alike were concerned about Yucca’s history of seismic activity and feared the repository could be more exposed to free oxygen – increasing the odds of radiation leaks.
The fact that Congress was telling, not asking, calcified opposition in a state that had no nuclear power plants and whose desert was the site of more than 900 Cold War-era atomic bomb tests.
That, combined with fears of shipping nuclear waste through Las Vegas – the state’s economic engine and nation’s party capital – sealed Yucca’s fate. It was Nevada’s Harry Reid who put the final nail in Yucca’s coffin when he Zbecame Senate majority leader.
Stress tests
Murray, a soft-spoken British native who has been working on nuclear energy for decades, is on a mission to make waste less scary.
His first challenge is to diffuse public concern about transporting nuclear waste to an eventual temporary storage site – location yet to be determined. Murray’s office will embark on a mission next year to put the fuel storage containers through a very creative – and very public – stress test, using whatever scenario people fear the most.
“We want to take a package, we want to crash a train into it, drop it on a hard surface, drive it into an abutment, set it on fire, drop it into a lake, fish it out,” Murray said. “Do they want to see us throw turkeys or chickens at it?” They’ll do it.
This series of feats has one goal: Show, not tell, that spent nuclear fuel is safe. Many other countries – France, the UK, Japan – regularly transport their spent fuel casks by train, boat or even trucks.
The other big item on Murray’s list is looking for states to raise their hands to host the nation’s spent fuel temporarily.
“Basically, any state that came forward, we can make it work,” Murray said.
States have so far been decidedly opposed to making it work.
Leaders in Texas are opposed to their state being a temporary solution, and a case over the future of nuclear waste storage in both Texas and neighboring New Mexico is headed to the Supreme Court.
New Mexico recently passed a ban on nuclear waste storage to stop Holtec, which owns several other nuclear plants in addition to Indian Point, from completing a storage site there.
Kenney, the state’s environmental secretary, said his opposition is in defense of people who have experienced health issues while either working in the state’s uranium mines, or living near the waste those mines produced.
Even attempts to clean up old uranium mine waste in New Mexico have proved controversial. High school students in Thoreau, New Mexico, protested an EPA plan to do just that because the agency proposed storing the waste in their town.
“Historically, the government hasn’t treated Navajos and Native Americans right,” Thoreau high school student Ezekiel Gonzales told CNN. “We can’t trust our government because of what they’ve done to us. That angers me and I’m pretty sure angers everyone else in my town.”
A nuclear option
Taxpayers have already paid $47 billion in storage fees on all of the homeless nuclear waste, and that price tag will continue to grow until the feds can find a permanent solution.
“The longer we wait to move it, the more they’ll have to pay,” said Frank Rusco, a director at the US Government Accountability Office, who focuses on energy.
Which is why some experts are promoting another solution, albeit a more politically tricky one: recycling. France has done it for years, converting used plutonium into product that can go back into reactors and generate more energy.
America’s massive, 94,000 ton cache of spent fuel is money down the drain, some experts contend.
“It doesn’t just need to be a one-time process,” said Greg Piefer, the founder and CEO of Shine Technologies, a nuclear fusion company that’s exploring reprocessing. “Every time you burn it, you can generate more plutonium, and then you burn that plutonium again.”
But first, the country would need to build a facility to actually recycle and reuse waste – and building it would be costly.
And as with Yucca Mountain, Congress would need to change an existing law meant to discourage weapons proliferation.
It’s a nuclear option worth examining as taxpayer costs and energy demands soar. On this, some lawmakers agree.
“Reprocessing should be part of the debate and the discussion, understanding how expensive it is,” Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico told CNN. “If there’s something that goes in the ground, it should the smallest amount.”
