"A Real Beginning, But Not a Victory": Five Tests for the Federal Nuclear Campus Plan
The United States is building nuclear again. It still has no authorized permanent home for the waste that comes with it. Those two facts have to be reconciled, and a recent column in The Hill is a useful map of how much work that reconciliation still requires.
In late July, the Department of Energy announced that five states had agreed to explore hosting Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses — sites that could co-locate multiple stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, from enrichment and fuel fabrication through reprocessing and waste disposition. Energy Secretary Chris Wright called them “massive generators of economic growth.”
Vincent Ialenti, a former Department of Energy official who served as federal manager for the department's Consent-Based Siting Consortia, credits the moment for what it is. After decades in which states treated nuclear waste as politically untouchable, five governors entering the negotiating room is, in his words, “a real achievement.” But he argues it is “a real beginning” rather than a victory, and that treating it as one risks repeating the cycle of overpromising and disappointment that has paralyzed American nuclear waste policy for forty years.
He sets five tests. Explain the scale projections, which moved from an illustrative 50,000 direct jobs at a single campus in DOE's January solicitation to 25,000 jobs per campus by July, against a national nuclear workforce of roughly 80,000. Produce a schedule that separately accounts for geological screening, site characterization, groundwater and seismic studies, environmental review, NRC licensing and transportation planning — because, as he puts it, a facility built to isolate waste for decades, centuries or millennia “cannot be validated on a ribbon-cutting schedule.”
Commit real money, with obligations enforceable against future administrations, rather than pointing states toward private capital. Secure congressional authorization for the spent-fuel storage and disposal components, which current law does not yet provide. And obtain genuine consent from a named host community — one with early involvement, a meaningful say over benefits, the participation of affected Tribal Nations, and a real chance to walk away
