New nuclear power boom begins with old problem: Radioactive waste

Nuclear power is back, largely due to the skyrocketing demand for electricity, including big tech’s hundreds of artificial intelligence data centers across the country and the reshoring of manufacturing. But it returns with an old and still-unsolved problem: storing all of the radioactive waste created as a byproduct of nuclear power generation.

In May, President Trump issued executive orders aimed at quadrupling the current nuclear output over the next 25 years by accelerating construction of both large conventional reactors and next-gen small modular reactors. Last week, the U.S. signed a deal with Westinghouse owners Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management to spend $80 billion to build nuclear plants across the country that could result in Westinghouse attempting to spinoff and IPO a stand-alone nuclear power company with the federal government as a shareholder.

There’s a growing consensus among governments, businesses and the public that the time is right for a nuclear power renaissance, and even if the ambitious build-out could take a decade or more and cost hundreds of billion of dollars, it will be an eventual boon to legacy and start-up nuclear energy companies, the AI-fixated wing of the tech industry and investors banking on their success.

But there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Only two nuclear power plants have been built since 1990 — more than $15 billion over budget and years behind schedule — and they went online in just the last two years. Almost all of the 94 reactors currently operating in 28 states, generating about 20% of the nation’s electricity, were built between 1967 and 1990. And though often unspoken, there’s the prickly issue that’s been grappled with ever since the first nuclear energy wave during the 1960s and ’70s: how to store, manage and dispose of radioactive waste, the toxic byproduct of harnessing uranium to generate electricity — and portions of which remain hazardous for millennia.

Solutions, employing old and new technologies, are under development by a number of private and public companies and in collaboration with the Department of Energy, which is required by law to accept and store spent nuclear fuel.

The most viable solution for permanently storing nuclear waste was first proffered back in 1957 by the National Academy of Sciences. Its report recommended burying the detritus in deep underground repositories (as opposed to the long-since-abandoned notion of blasting it into low-Earth orbit). It wasn’t until 1982, though, that Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, assigning the DOE responsibility for finding such a site.

Five years later, lawmakers designated Yucca Mountain, a 6,700-foot promontory about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, as the nation’s sole geological repository. Thus began a contentious, years-long saga — involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, legislators, lawyers,…