Don’t Let the Nuclear Industry Use “Clean Energy” the Way it Once Used “End the War”

A recent New York Times article featured Bill Gates standing on the site of a future nuclear reactor in Wyoming, holding a shovel and trying his best to look like he’d ever used one before. The Wyoming reactor has many obstacles to overcome in its future construction, including the “inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before,” and the fact that the plans haven’t even been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Plumer 2024). Nuclear energy, a “reliable, very low-carbon power” that “currently provides around 10 percent of the world’s electricity” but produces waste which “after over seventy years is yet to be resolved globally” (Peters 2023, 229), is often proclaimed a necessary component of combatting climate change. However, it is also fair to ask how an industry historically responsible for Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, in which price hikes and delays are “inevitable,” and which has never found a solution for the waste its reactors continually produce, is still rushing to build new reactors before the plans are even approved.

When discussing nuclear energy, even articles focused around the unsolved problem of storing nuclear waste often declare in their opening lines that nuclear power is a necessary and indispensable aspect of meaningful climate action, while admitting in the next line that there is still no solution for storing its waste: “Nuclear power plays a pivotal role in ensuring a scalable, affordable, and reliable low-carbon electricity supply…its management remains one of the most important challenges when considering the continued use and expansion of nuclear energy” (Kvashnina et al. 2024); “Nuclear power is an ideal option for sustainable energy sources from U-235 fission. However, this energy generates long-term radioactive waste such as partially used nuclear fuel (PUNF) during electricity production.” (Kurniawan et al. 2021).

The argument of such articles is essentially that even though nuclear is exorbitantly expensive, occasionally prone to catastrophic accidents, and constantly producing waste which will be toxic for hundreds of thousands of years—waste for which there is as of yet no solution other than burying it in a glorified hole and hoping nothing disturbs it in an unknown future—its necessity to combat climate change is unquestionable.

However, nuclear as a necessary component of a clean energy future is far from universally accepted. Gregory B. Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under the Obama administration, began his book describing when he “had become skeptical of the nuclear power industry to properly balance its fiscal responsibility to shareholders with the demands of public safety” (Jaczko 2019, 7) before later arriving a the conclusion that “There is only one logical answer: we must stop generating nuclear waste, and that means we must stop using nuclear power” (69).

Donald Trump’s reelection means horror for advocates of wind and solar power, but the future of the Biden administration’s plans to triple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 are less straightforward, as Trump has historically praised nuclear’s clean energy but criticized its high costs (Bittle 2024). While Trump considering nuclear might seem a ray of hope for climate advocates, its very important to remember that a lot of money can be made in taking as long as possible to build a nuclear reactor (Ramana 2024, 143-144) or taking as long as possible clean up the toxic legacies of nuclear projects (Frank 2022, 37). In other words, the nuclear industry might provide the exact kind of investments the President is attracted to (Whitehurst 2023).

Anything relating to nuclear operates in the long term. From the beginning of construction, a nuclear plant takes at least a decade, possibly two, to start producing electricity (Ramana 2024, 12). Nuclear fuel spends up to two years in a reactor, and is then toxic for hundreds of thousands of years (Jaczko 2019, 54). Two thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel are added by active nuclear reactors every year, and as of 2022 there were 65,000 tons already in interim storage (Gómez 2022, 114). However, despite the need for long term thinking, the nuclear industry is famous for short term solutions. This is demonstrated by each of the three secret cities created for the Manhattan Project—Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge—when the national push to create a nuclear weapon of mass destruction paralleled the contemporary urgency to create nuclear carbon-free electricity: the rush to accomplish a central goal takes priority over safety, long-term planning, and the well-being of local residents—residents who are predominantly indigenous, poor, or people of color.

Hanford provides the most egregious example of environmental degradation in the name of nuclear progress, where “over its lifespan, nuclear production discharged 450 billion gallons of radioactive liquids into the soil” and to this day 177 leaking underground tanks from the 1970’s hold fifty-three million gallons of waste (Frank 2022, 37), which were always meant to be a temporary solution (47). The waste in these tanks continually generates flammable gas, which could result in an explosion if not ventilated properly (67).

Some nuclear industry advocates argue that you’re more likely to die in a car crash than due to a nuclear accident (Jaczko 2019, 49), or that we can’t be afraid to fly in planes simply because very rarely one crashes, etc. These rationals are meant to assure us that accidents happen, and we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. However, meaning no disrespect to the tragedy of car or plane crashes, when one happens, we mourn the dead and help the injured, we clean the crash site, we (hopefully) research what went wrong to prevent it from ever happening again, and life resumes. Imagine instead if every time a car crashed we couldn’t go anywhere near the crash site for generations, anyone who happened to be nearby during the crash had increased risk of cancer, and the surrounding areas had to be evacuated, and cleared of agriculture and livestock. The likelihood of a crash would still be rare, but maybe the potential consequences would make us rethink the need to drive cars. In the age of climate change, perhaps we don’t want to risk losing entire swaths of land for generations. A Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, or similar accident at Hanford would not be equivalent to a car or plane crash, it could mean the obliteration of the entire U.S. Pacific Northwest economy (Frank 2022, 68).

The urgency of cleaning up Hanford is countered by an overtaxed and underfunded Department of Energy, and lucrative private contracts that reward slow progress: Bechdel, the contractor in charge of the Hanford cleanup, has seen the contract inflate from $110 billion to between $316 and $662 billion in six years (Frank 2022, 8), due to “cost and schedule performance based” contracts, in which payments are made for meeting milestones even as the overall timeline and costs increase, and regardless of whether the work is completed on time, or at all (85).

Hanford is the clearest lens to view the future of nuclear under the imminent Trump administration: on the one hand, it is an urgent, dangerous biohazard in need of clean up to prevent a possible disaster. On the other, the longer it remains filled with nuclear waste, the more profitable it remains to companies like Bechdel. Whether the new president will prioritize the profits of business or the health of the planet seems obvious, but even under Biden’s administration in 2020 and again in 2021, the DOE pushed for the waste stored at Hanford to be reclassified as “low-level,” which would allow the waste to be buried in shallow repositories, as the more volatile elements break down over the next sixteen million years (Frank 2022, 210). Reclassifying nuclear waste is illegal (211) for now, but Trump’s proposed head of the DOE being an oil CEO who’s in favor of global warming does not bode well for the future of nuclear cleanup (Jones 2024).

The cash-grab immediacy of breaking ground on new nuclear reactors is countered by foot-dragging on cleaning up the historical legacy of the Manhattan Project, both in terms of disposing nuclear waste and compensating victims. Hanford is hardly the only place affected by the legacy of pioneering nuclear warfare: in 2008, Oak Ridge faced a landslide of 7.3 million tons of gray sludge after the holding ponds of sodden coal fly ash ruptured. These ponds were used “despite environmentalists’ recommendations that coal fly ash be buried in lined landfills,” and upon bursting were revealed to be holding more than twice the declared amount of waste (Strasser 2023, 18). Another site, a waste landfill for Oak Ridge that opened in 2002, is nearing its two million cubic yard storage limit, and a new one currently being planned to supplement it comes with a price tag of somewhere between $700-900 million. These sites require “perpetual care,” meaning “when the landfill is capped, the DOE will monitor and maintain the lined cells against leakage and decay, forever” (46). Again, the issue of nuclear is a long-term concept: the only ideal solution settled on so far for disposing nuclear waste is burying it deep and leaving it undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years (Kurniawan 2021). This “perpetual care” means that sites must be consistently staffed with a highly trained workforce in perpetuity, no matter what natural disasters or regime changes might attempt to disturb stored waste or defund government regulatory agencies.

The bury-it-in-a-hole solution to waste, called a “deep geological repository (DGR)” (Kurniawan 2021), also depends on peoples’ willingness to live near toxic nuclear byproducts. Historically this has proven undesirable, and hence the biohazards resulting from nuclear power are predominantly foisted on poor communities, communities of color, and indigenous communities (Gómez 2022, 48). The failed effort to build a DGR at Yucca Mountain illustrates this paradigm. Originally, the Department of Energy was supposed to find two sites to store nuclear waste, one in the eastern and one in the western United States: “Given that most nuclear power plants were situated in the eastern half of the United States, there really was no reason to look to the west, except for the fact that the wide open spaces seemed better suited to isolating dangerous material,” and yet Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the only site chosen: “one state had to host the repository, and many states had to get rid of their waste. In the 1980s Nevada had a weak congressional delegation and a large swath of federal land. It was a political decision, and the state’s residents and elected officials knew it” (Jaczko 2019, 56).

A general lack of interest in living near nuclear waste means that choosing storage sites perpetuates the history of “nuclear colonialism,” described by Myrriah Gómez in Nuclear Nuevo México: “the state-sponsored occupation of Indigenous homelands that results in the displacement and elimination of native inhabitants in favor of building and preserving a nuclear economy” (48). Before settling on Los Alamos, Oak City, Utah, was also considered, but that would have meant the resettlement of thirty families of white English-speaking Mormons; instead, building the site at Los Alamos meant the dislocation of at least thirty Nuevomexicana/o families (36). Oak Ridge was almost built forty miles outside of Chicago (Strasser 2023, 36), but instead a thousand poor farmers and three thousand tenant farmers in Tennessee were forced to uproot their lives—the Cherokee had already been forced off of the land since 1798 (37). Hanford was chosen as an ideal site despite having “1,500 residents, mostly peasant farmers and Wanapum, Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce people—tribes that still fished for Columbia River salmon, as their ancestors had for thousands of years (Frank 2022, 15). By Hanford’s decommissioning in the 1970’s, the Columbia was the United States’ most radioactive river (35).

The excuses of urgency, secrecy, and patriotism that were used to justify nuclear land-grabs under the War Powers Act (Frank 2022, 16) cannot be used as a way to make nuclear is a core tenet of a greener US power grid, even if “save the climate” is subbed in for “end the war” to justify rushed work and sloppy planning. The true urgency of combatting climate change cannot be used to rush nuclear projects that bring massive amounts of potential risk; presumably a radioactive incident at a reactor costs the environment much more than the benefits of a reactor providing a percentage of carbon-free electricity. Likewise, the struggle to solve the issue of nuclear waste cannot be allowed to find solutions in more nuclear land grabs like those in the Manhattan Project. But building waste repositories in poor areas is still the commonly proposed solution.

By the time the Yucca Mountain storage facility was finally cancelled in 2010, it had been worked on for thirty-five years (Jaczko 2019, 67), thousands of people lost their jobs (63), and it had cost “about $13.5 billion, split eighty-twenty between electricity consumers (“ratepayers”) and citizens (“taxpayers”)…Not a single ounce of waste will likely be buried there, ever” (Ramana 2024, 98). After the failure to store waste at Yucca Mountain, attention shifted back to New Mexico, where the Waste Isolation Processing Plant—the only deep-geologic nuclear waste repository in the country—has already been in operation since 1999 (Gómez 2022,115). A new storage facility proposed by Holtec would bring “173,600 metric tons of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel to southeastern New Mexico,” ostensibly temporarily, but without a permanent facility being built it could become permanent storage by default (120).

Former NRC Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko had plenty of criticism regarding Yucca Mountain, from the choice of the site: “The rock that would hold the nuclear waste allowed far too much water to penetrate; water would eventually free the radiation and carry it elsewhere;” to the effectiveness of underground storage in general: “Realistically forecasting the complex, long-term behavior of spent nuclear fuel in underground facilities is scientifically impossible” (Jaczko 2019, 58); to the need for establishing a separate storage site in the first place: “although the nuclear industry objects to this as a permanent solution, with proper monitoring the fuel can be safely stored on-site for centuries at least” (54). However, as the choice of Yucca Mountain was a political decision due to Nevada’s weak legislature at the time (56), so the targeting of New Mexico is a strategy of finding the path of least resistance, offloading the toxic byproducts of the nuclear industry into areas with high poverty rates and an available labor pool (Gómez 2022, 122-123). Often the promised economic opportunities of the nuclear industry are used to gloss over the potential danger: “people in power presenting hazardous waste industries disguised as economic opportunities to poor communities overwhelmingly made up of people of color” (121).

Opposition to nuclear waste storage facilities actually provides rare moments of bipartisan support. Another proposed storage facility to be built near the Texas/New Mexico border was opposed by both states’ governors, with Texas governor Greg Abbot stating that his state “will not become America’s nuclear waste dumping ground” (Dobkin 2024).

Without a solution to the issue of nuclear waste, the nuclear industry has little to offer the fight for the future of the planet: deep geological repositories remain “the most ideal solution for long-term storage…as it provides an ultimate destination in a deep underground that permanently isolates the waste from inhabitants and the environment” (Kurniawan et al 2021, 1). The same article goes on to state that “in the long term, a complete recycling of used nuclear fuel is the best option” (1), but the point is that recycling nuclear fuel is not yet an option, and yet Bill Gates poses proudly with his shovel.

The safety of deep geological repositories also depends on certainty that the waste will not be disturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, including by storms, earthquakes, hurricanes, or other natural disasters in a future of worsening climate catastrophes caused by global warming. To speak of nuclear energy and nuclear waste storage is to speak in terms of time periods longer than any of us can comprehend, during which highly skilled workforces must offer “perpetual care” (Strasser 2023, 46) in watching over volatile materials in sophisticated reactors and storage facilities, which must continue to function no matter what hardships may come. In contrast to this long term thinking, November 2024 revealed that the entire structure of the United States government could be different as of January 2025.

This overhaul will greatly affect a Department of Energy that is already overtasked and understaffed (Frank 2022, 142), which has already tried to reclassify dangerous nuclear waste in order to make it cheaper and easier to clean up (207). The DOE is also already easily pushed around by the profit-minded nuclear industry, which is intent on keeping safety regulations as convenient and affordable as possible (Jaczko 2019, 12), and uses lobbying efforts and the promise of new jobs to guarantee a friendly Congress and newly licensed reactors: “In Washington today there is no more powerful statement than one that includes the word ‘job’” (134). Bechdel, the company owning the contract to clean up the Hanford site, spent $1.8 billion lobbying before the 2020 election, with $32,734 to Trump, and $51,795 to Biden (Frank 2022, 90). The promised jobs at nuclear reactors and waste storage facilities are disproportionately forced on poor areas and communities of color, in acts of environmental racism perpetuating the legacy of nuclear colonialism (Gómez 2023, 21-23). All of this for electricity that has become more and more expensive to produce, as wind and solar energy continues to get cheaper (Jaczko 2019, 162).

Bill Gates breaking ground for a nuclear reactor whose plans haven’t been approved yet isn’t an unusual practice: “Over the course of constructing the V.C. Summer and Vogtle projects, Reuters reported in May 2017, Westinghouse made ‘several thousand’ technical and design changes” (Ramana 2024, 108). Such projects illustrate the nuclear industry’s propensity for short term thinking and sprinting forward to accomplish their goals, with little regard for toxic legacies or for cleaning up its messes: in New Mexico, “The reality was that the scientists and medical professionals were only concerned with the short-term effects of the radiation that resulted from the test; they admitted to not having the foresight or time to think about any long-term effects” (Gómez 2022, 108); in Hanford, toxic waste was buried in shallow tanks near the Columbia River, “a short-term fix to a problem with no long-term solution” (Frank 2022, 47); and in Oak Ridge, holding ponds that had been known to have weaknesses since the ’70’s burst and released “1.1 billion gallons of toxic muck” into the surrounding area, a spill five times bigger than the oil released in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (Strasser 2023, 18).

The push to develop a weapon of mass destruction was used to justify this short term thinking. “Win the war” cannot be replaced with “clean energy” as a means to justify rushed projects with new toxic legacies harming generations of people. In order to meaningfully combat climate change, the fleet of nuclear reactors worldwide would have to go from around four hundred to “a figure in the thousands” (Jaczko 2019, 163), and each of those sites comes with some risk of another Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima, in an imminent age of deregulation, slashed funding, and environmental catastrophe.

Former NRC Chairman Jaczby made a point about safety standards that I’d like to close with: “safety” is not a scientific truth. Rather, safety standards are a set of norms agreed upon which balance the competing interests of all parties involved: a balance between scientific research, “societal norms, traditions, customs, and politics” (60). The implication of this is that as the composition of the decision-makers changes, the safety standards change as well. With a room full of scientists, we’re likely to have safety standards which adhere to the results of research. With a room full of business people, like the one we’re likely to have in January, we are likely to have safety standards which lead to the benefit of business. If unregulated business and big profits are the guiding principles of government, there is no place for nuclear energy—carbon-free electricity or not.

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