Where Will All of Big Tech’s Nuclear Waste Go?

There’s a field in Wiscasset, Maine (Population 3,742) protected by armed guards. On the field is a chain link fence surrounding a pad of concrete. On the pad are 60 cement and steel canisters that contain 1,400 spent nuclear fuel rods, the leavings of a power plant that shut down almost 30 years ago.

The containers are full of nuclear waste. The locals don’t love it, but there’s nowhere for it to go. The issue of what to do with America’s nuclear waste is a problem that’s solved in theory but stalled in practice thanks to a decades-long political fight. The country needs more power, and faster, and tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon all announced this year that they’re moving forward with plans to go nuclear.

That means there’s going to be more nuclear waste than ever before. Where will it go? If the current system holds, it’ll be stored near the reactors. Right now, nuclear waste is put in stainless steel containers and sealed in a concrete structure called a dry cask. Dry casks are, by all accounts, remarkably safe. If they’re undisturbed, they could remain so for centuries.

But the world is not static. The climate is changing. Wildfires, earthquakes, and rising ocean levels pose a threat to those dry casks. An earthquake, flood, or fire swallowing up one or two dry casks might not cause a problem. But there’s about to be more of them.

Big Tech’s nuclear push

America’s nuclear waste is piling up. It’s a political problem, not a scientific one. Other countries with nuclear infrastructure bury their waste deep underground in specially designed storage facilities called deep geological repositories. We could do that in America. We even started building one. The problem is that no one wants a giant cave filled with nuclear waste in their backyard.

It’s hard to blame them. The U.S. has a terrible track record when it comes to handling waste. For years, we’d store it in barrels and dump it into the sea. Waste leftover from the Manhattan Project is still poisoning people today. In South Carolina, radioactive alligators once roamed the Savannah River Site where pieces of nuclear weapons were made. The Hanford Site in Washington state is sitting on 54 million gallons of waste that may never be cleaned up.

To meet Big Tech’s energy demands, we’ll add more to the pile.

2024 was the year Big Tech went all in on nuclear energy. Data centers are power-hungry beasts and the increased use of number-crunching artificial intelligence systems means that tech companies need more energy than ever before. To solve the problem, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all betting on nuclear energy.

Google announced a partnership with Kairos Power aimed at building multiple small modular reactors (SMR) in October. Amazon also announced it was building SMRs in cooperation with Energy Northwest, X-Energy, and Dominion Energy. Meta, later to the game than the others, asked companies for proposals on how it could generate 1-4 gigawatts (the equivalent of hundreds of millions of LED light bulbs) using nuclear power.

Microsoft, who has been working on this for a long time, is partnered with TerraPower to build SMRs. It also announced a partnership with Constellation Energy that would reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Nuclear power is hard to do. Its fuel sources are rare and heavily regulated. When it works, it provides clean and efficient fuel for millions of people. When it goes wrong, it’s a disaster that can help topple governments and give cancer to millions. Traditional reactors require billions in investment and decades of construction time.

But Big Tech isn’t looking to go the traditional route. They’re talking about new kinds of reactors. “There’s been a talk of a renaissance for decades. Depending on who you talk to, we could be in our third or fourth renaissance, or our eighth or ninth. So let’s leave the R-word aside,” Cindy Vestergaard, a senior fellow and director of Converging Technologies for the Stimson Center, told Gizmodo. Vestergaard is a nuclear supply chain expert who focuses on nonproliferation.

When people think of nuclear power they often picture the enormous cooling towers and sprawling complexes filled with scientists. The dream of SMRs is that they could do away with much of that. There are dozens of designs, but the basic concept is that these new reactors would be tiny compared to traditional reactors (some of them would even be portable) and can be spun up and decommissioned to match the demands of the grid.

“A lot of these designs have been around for decades,” Vestergaard said. It’s just that the economic incentives didn’t exist to make them a reality. Thanks to climate change and the demands of Big Tech, that’s changed. “Solar and wind are great in many ways, but they need to be supplemented.”

Big Tech may understand business, but energy companies are a whole different thing. “We have a newbie engaging in this…which means we have a lag time in what it all means,” Vestergaard said. “They have a lot of money, so deep pockets, I think, help drive a lot of innovation going forward that we would not have seen in the past. So I think that gives them a nuclear leg-up…most investors do not understand the long game in nuclear.”

The pitch for many of these SMRs is also that they’re safer and they’ll produce less waste. Vestergaard isn’t so sure. “We hear ‘oh, they’re safer, they’re more efficient.’ Well, we don’t know that. Maybe on paper. We have to test and demonstrate this.”

I reached out to Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and some of their nuclear power partners to see how they’re thinking about how to manage waste. Meta and Microsoft referred me to posts on their websites about sustainability. Amazon told me to reach out to its energy partners. Google didn’t respond.

Of Big Tech’s partners, only TerraPower—who is working with Microsoft—got back to us. It said that its Natrium reactors will produce more energy and less waste than any other reactor on the planet. “The Natrium technology will reduce the volume of waste per megawatt hour of energy produced by two-thirds because of the efficiency with which it uses fuel,” it said. “The waste the Natrium reactor does produce will be stored safely and securely onsite through proven methods used at plants throughout the country until the United States identifies a permanent geologic repository.”

TerraPower identified the core problem of nuclear waste in the U.S. The government needs to identify a permanent geologic repository. It’s having trouble doing that.

Not in my backyard

According to Vestergaard, Big Tech may not be ready for something it’s been bad at in the past—dealing with an angry populace. “The local populations pay billions into these huge infrastructure projects,” she said. “Big tech, historically, has not had a good sense of what it’s like to have engagement at the local level. That’s another thing where they’re going to have to learn, and adjust, and adapt to public hearings.”

People come out when nuclear waste enters their backyards. The risk of cancer, radioactive animals, and environmental destruction is real. And people know it.

These reactors will be built in someone’s backyard. Several of the companies are talking about building them on-site, next to data centers. Taxpayer cash will go towards these reactors and it’ll expect to get something in return. Not all the power can go to the data centers and large language models.

It’ll all generate waste. Waste with nowhere to go. After decades of mismanagement, the federal government attempted to get hold of America’s nuclear waste problem in the 1980s. Its solution was to build a deep geological repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. It even started construction. The people of Nevada, who have long borne the brunt of America’s nuclear ambitions, didn’t want it there.

“In the United States, there’s never really been public consent. It’s not like they went to Nevada and said ‘What if we put it here? What do you guys think about it?’” Vestergaard said. “The United States itself is incredibly split and stuck on its nuclear waste problem, So there’s a law, back from the 80s, that says it’s gotta be at Yucca Mountain.

She added that, at this point, America has enough nuclear waste waiting around to fill Yucca Mountain three times over. “So even if Yucca Mountain was still a viable option, it isn’t. Particularly for new nuclear reactors that would be coming on board,” she said.

Opponents called the law the “Screw Nevada Bill.”

The same law that designated Yucca Mountain as the site of future nuclear waste also created the Office of the United States Nuclear Waste Negotiator. The idea was that this office would negotiate with states and tribal leaders in the U.S. to find an interim storage solution for nuclear waste. Created in 1987, the position wasn’t filled until 1990. It was eliminated in 1995.

One of the problems is that, according to the laws, nuclear waste can no longer be stored in a state or patch of tribal land without the consent of the people who live there. And no one wants it. So instead of going to a central location for permanent disposal, it sits on sites near where it’s made, some 94 locations and growing.

Kissing casks

I kissed a cask (of nuclear waste) and I liked it. pic.twitter.com/xR0ZEERVUk

— isabelle 🪐 (@isabelleboemeke) December 19, 2024

Science and nuclear influencers love to kiss nuclear waste. “I kissed a cask (of nuclear waste) and I liked it,” Isabelle Boemeke, known as Isodope online, said in a post on X on December 19. The attached pictures show her kissing a dry cask filled with nuclear waste.

Boemeke is one of a number of nuclear influencers who use their platform to agitate for more nuclear power. The kissing a cask of nuclear waste stunt is popular among science YouTubers and the only thing strange about Boemeke’s post is that it’s come after so many other people have done it.

“Yes, dry casks are incredibly safe,” Vestergaard said. “I put my hand on them as well and stood by them.”

The problem is not that casks aren’t a great way to store nuclear waste, they are, it’s that they stick around on the site where the waste was made. Boemeke’s pic was at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California. The plant is California’s last operational nuclear power site and the state planned to shut it down.

Then Boemeke and Grimes started making PSAs online about why it needed to remain. It worked. Regulators voted to extend the life of Diablo Canyon to at least 2030. That means the site will generate more nuclear waste. Waste which will remain on site. Diablo Canyon is next to major fault lines. It’s near San Luis Obispo, a community now perennially threatened by wildfires. The San Onofre nuclear power plant south of Los Angeles sits on a major faultline. It’s also sitting on 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste.

For some experts, the dry casks are a fine solution and the benefits of nuclear power generation far outweigh the negatives of nuclear waste. “Climate change is a clear and present danger of global scale with a wide range of damaging impacts on geologic time scales,” Jesse D. Jenkins, an Assistant Professor at Princeton University, said in a post about nuclear waste on BlueSky. “Small volumes of spent nuclear fuel can be contained safely in dry cask storage for century+ time scales.”

“The entire history of US civilian nuclear power, which has produced 1/5th of our electricity for decades with no CO2 or air pollution, has produced less than 100,000 tons of high-level waste. We burn billions of tons of fossil fuels EVERY YEAR,” Jenkins said. “That means the entirety of spent nuclear fuel fits in less than 10,000 dry casks…That’s it. All of it. And this is ‘the nuclear waste problem’ that means we should supposedly eschew this proven source of emissions-free electricity? Nah.”

I am not arguing that we shouldn’t adopt nuclear energy. Jenkins and others are right. Dry casks are mostly safe. But I do think nuclear waste is a problem. And more reactors mean more spent fuel that needs to be managed, more dry casks spread across the country, and more armed guards on patrol like those in that field in Maine.

A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office uncovered something shocking. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency that manages waste, hasn’t studied the effects of climate change on the dry casks and nuclear power plants.

“NRC primarily uses historical data in its licensing and oversight processes rather than climate projections data,” the report said. When the GAO interviewed officials at the Commission, they told investigators that they had it under control. “However, NRC has not conducted an assessment to demonstrate that this is the case,” the report said.

The report detailed the hazards facing nuclear power plants. “According to our analysis of U.S. Forest Service and NRC data, about 20 percent of nuclear power plants (16 of 75) are located in areas with a high or very high potential for wildfire.” More than sixty percent of nuclear power plants, 47 of 75, are located in areas with exposure to Category 4 and 5 hurricanes and in an area where NOAA predicted the sea levels will rise.

Big Tech is going to build more nuclear power plants. Oil and gas are dirty sources of power. Nuclear has the potential to be much cleaner and more efficient. Nuclear energy is also mostly safe, the problem is that when things go bad they go catastrophically bad. More reactors mean more points of failure and more waste. Waste that’s in need of a permanent home.

One can only hope that the same lobbyists Big Tech rolls out whenever it needs something done in Washington can help them find a permanent home for America’s spent nuclear fuel.