Take steps on SNF and HLW disposal

June 20, 2025, 3:08PMNuclear NewsMatt Bowen

Matt Bowen

With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.

In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”¹

Given that when he came to the DOE, Perry scrapped the Obama administration’s consent-based siting plans for new repositories and reinstated the budget request for Yucca Mountain, it was a noteworthy assessment. If Energy Secretary Wright decides to heed this observation and follow a path of “practical consent,” there are multiple actions he could take. Two are outlined below.

Engage with Congress and industry on creating a new organization to manage the commercial SNF inventory. There is wide agreement that a separate organization with no mission other than waste management, and one designed for greater continuity over longer periods of time, would have structural advantages over trying to carry out a consent-based siting program from inside the DOE. The revolving door of political appointees at the agency and the myriad different competing policy and budget priorities argue for it by themselves.

Secretary Wright could convene meetings with industry and members of Congress to discuss the outlines of what such an entity should look like. It might, for example, look similar to Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which was created 23 years ago and just selected a repository site last year—with the consent of the local community. Congress will need to fix other aspects of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) concurrently, such as the difficulty in accessing the money from the Nuclear Waste Fund that is supposed to pay for commercial SNF disposal and the restriction that limits site-specific work to Yucca Mountain. There have been some bipartisan efforts in Congress over the past decade to create a new organization that would have greater continuity over political administrations and ready access to future NWF payments that could be used as a starting point for those discussions.

There is now a large amount of commercial SNF—over 90,000 metric tons—in the United States, with 2,000 tons added every year. Thanks to a decade-old court decision, the NWF fee has been set to zero, and thus utilities have paid nothing into the NWF since that time to cover disposal of 10,000-plus metric tons of SNF. And the fee is still set to zero, so any new reactors that begin operations will not be paying into the NWF for the SNF they produce. All of these factors, in addition to those mentioned above, are going to complicate a state’s consideration of hosting a disposal facility for commercial SNF, and it will be harder still if the DOE remains the implementing body.

The three U.S. sites hosting defense-related HLW and SNF.

Publish a plan for siting a defense HLW and SNF repository. By contrast, many of the challenges cited above do not exist for a repository limited to defense HLW and SNF. The NWPA does not restrict defense waste to Yucca Mountain, so all sites in the United States can be considered. There is no debate to be had over the merits of reprocessing—the fissile material has already largely been removed. With the shutdown of U.S. plutonium production reactors decades ago, the defense inventory is both smaller (approximately 14,000 metric tons) and effectively not increasing.

The DOE has published reports in the past explaining why a repository focused exclusively on cooler, less-radioactive defense waste would be easier to site, design, license, and operate, compared with one holding both commercial and defense wastes.² A defense waste facility could thus be available sooner, which would carry the benefit of reducing the costs associated with storing defense waste in addition to providing (hopefully) another success story from which future commercial efforts could benefit. A defense facility would also clearly be paid for by defense appropriations and not from the NWF, and the DOE has already sited, designed, and operated a repository for nuclear waste disposal using defense appropriations—the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. As opposed to the many dozens of sites in the United States that host commercial SNF, there are only three that host defense HLW and SNF: the Hanford Site in Washington state, Idaho National Laboratory, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This simplifies the transportation planning, which could be accomplished by truck, just as it is with the WIPP program.

All of these qualities could make it easier for a state to get its mind around the commitment of hosting a defense repository, and even for the DOE to more plausibly implement the program. And if a state decided that it wanted the program to be run by a different entity, it could make such a request to Congress, which would likely grant the request. On the other hand, the city of Carlsbad, N.M., has now worked with the DOE (and its predecessors) for more than a half-century and remains enthusiastic about and supportive of WIPP.

Along these lines, Secretary Wright could direct his staff to publish a plan for how the siting of a defense repository would work—the major phases, as well as the smaller steps within each phase—and clearly identify the areas for state and local government collaboration (or perhaps where and when the measures of practical consent will be applied). A planning document for siting a defense repository would also be valuable as a template for future planning of commercial repositories, especially as it may take years for Congress to create a new entity to manage commercial SNF, let alone for the new organization to be sufficiently stood up.

Whatever Secretary Wright decides to do, here’s hoping we aren’t in the exact same position four years from now.

Matt Bowen is a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, focusing on nuclear energy, waste, and nonproliferation.