In late July, the Department of Energy announced that five states – Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Idaho – had agreed to explore hosting Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses: sites that could co-locate uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, spent fuel reprocessing, waste disposition and, in some states, advanced reactors. Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the campuses “massive generators of economic growth” and “crucial to unleashing America’s nuclear renaissance.”
Writing in The Hill on August 25, Vincent Ialenti offered a different reading. Ialenti is a former Department of Energy official who served as federal manager for the Consent-Based Siting Consortia, a $24 million, 12-team initiative supporting public engagement around the siting of spent-fuel storage facilities. His argument is not that the campus initiative is a bad idea. It is that the celebration is early.
“Five signed memoranda are not five host communities,” he writes. No final host agreement has been signed, no construction funds have been awarded, and the states have agreed only to continue negotiating. Before anyone declares that four decades of gridlock have been broken, he argues, the plan has to clear five tests.
First, explain the projections. DOE’s January solicitation described an illustrative scenario in which a single campus employed 50,000 direct workers and generated another 100,000 to 150,000 indirect jobs – against an entire existing U.S. nuclear workforce the same document put at roughly 80,000. By July, DOE was projecting 25,000 jobs per campus. “Numbers that swing this far before a single site is chosen are aspirations, not plans.”
Second, produce a technically credible schedule — one that separately accounts for geological screening, independent site characterization, groundwater and seismic studies, environmental review, NRC licensing, transportation planning and host-agreement negotiation. Third, commit real money: for nearly everything outside a repository, he notes, DOE pointed states toward private capital while committing to no federal cost-share of its own.
Fourth, get Congress to authorize the spent-fuel storage and disposal components. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act still directs the federal repository program toward Yucca Mountain, which Congress has not funded since fiscal 2010, and bars construction of a centralized federal spent fuel storage facility until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized construction of a repository. “The department cannot designate one of the five states as a spent fuel site by press release.”
And fifth, consent. Governors signed and some local governments have expressed preliminary support, but Ialenti writes that it is far from clear any specific community has agreed to live beside nuclear waste facilities. Genuine consent, he argues, requires a named candidate community, early involvement rather than after-the-fact persuasion, meaningful say over benefits, the participation of affected Tribal Nations, and a real chance to walk away before commitments are final.