Read the fine print and pay attention to the stuff they tell you at the end of the pitch.
Idaho has been chosen as one of five states (the others are Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Louisiana) under consideration to host one of three national Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses. Landing one of those, the pitch went, would mean jobs, business opportunities - money! “Campus” was nice verbiage: It sounds like a leafy college setting.
Or that’s the mental image. There’s little real clarity about what it would mean as a practical matter. The closest the Department of Energy gets to explaining what these campuses would be is that they “could support activities across the full nuclear fuel lifecycle, including fuel fabrication, enrichment, reprocessing used nuclear fuel, and disposition of waste. Depending on state priorities and regional capabilities, the sites could also host advanced reactor deployment, power generation, advanced manufacturing, and co-located data centers.” (Data centers! Yum.)
Mostly, the description sounds like what the Idaho National Laboratory already does, and has done for decades. It has been the nation’s locus for cutting-edge nuclear research, with new reactor projects announced regularly and private spinoffs in the Magic Valley and elsewhere. The national divide into three campuses carries the uneasy tone of a diminution of Idaho’s role in the field.
But wait: Beyond that, there’s a little phrase buried in the middle of that: “Deposition of waste.” You know, the nuclear waste that Idaho state government has spent half a century trying to block from the state.
It’s been quite a few years since the subject of importing nuclear waste was big headlines in Idaho, but it once was as hot a topic as any, and concern about it was bipartisan.
In his memoir, Cecil Andrus made the point that the wrong waste seeping into the wrong places could be disastrous for Idaho agriculture, industry and human safety:”I am not a nuclear scientist, but I understood one point from the beginning: Radioactive garbage from the nuclear reservation in Idaho could not - must not - be allowed to come anywhere near the Snake River aquifer.”
He recalled that “I tried to play constructive critic during my first stint as governor in the 1970s, receiving - and believing - promises of action (on removing nuclear waste) from the federal government. Since those pledges proved worthless, I confronted the Department of Energy in the late 1980s. The state of Idaho provoked a crisis by banning further waste shipments from beyond Idaho’s border.”
Andrus was a Democrat, but his successor Phil Batt, had views on nuclear waste not drastically different; he agreed, for example, with Andrus’ take on the aquifer (and in his memoir estimated 90% of Idahoans did as well). He doggedly negotiated an agreement with the feds sharply limiting the state’s exposure to nuclear waste, and getting much of it shipped out. He said he got from the feds “every ounce of flesh I could get,” and he may have been right. The action part of the deal ran through the last century.
The deal has not held up perfectly, but for the most part it has shielded Idaho from becoming the nuclear garbage waste dump of the nation.
The eventual costs of cleaning out unsecured nuclear waste can be beyond enormous. Consider the Hanford site in south-central Washington, where every year - for decades - billions of dollars have been spent in cleanup activities. In 2022, after a generations-worth of cleanup work had been done, the estimated cost for finishing the job was put at somewhere between $300 and $640 billion. That’s serious money.
Now, if Idaho becomes one of the three “campus” hosts, it will be on the hook for hosting the nation’s nuclear waste. (And we all know how careful the Trump Administration is with handling such sensitive and risky projects.)
They used to say that Idaho is what America was. Today, we might say Idaho isn’t what Idaho was.
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