The victory lap on Trump’s nuclear campus plan is premature

In late July, the Department of Energy announced that five states — Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Idaho — had agreed to explore hosting Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses .

Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the campuses “massive generators of economic growth” that would be “crucial to unleashing America’s nuclear renaissance.” The American Nuclear Society echoed him, its president promising “multigenerational job creation, sustained economic growth, and new investment in education and workforce development.”

By folding nuclear waste into a sweeping economic development package, the department has invited states to compete for campuses that could co-locate multiple stages of the nuclear fuel cycle — such as uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, spent fuel reprocessing, waste disposition and, in some states, advanced reactors. This is all while using the appeal of nuclear power investment to soften the politics of hosting long-term waste facilities.

It is an appealing vision. But five signed memoranda are not five host communities. No final host agreement has been signed, no construction funds awarded and the states have agreed only to continue negotiations. That is a real beginning, but it is not a victory. Treating it as one risks repeating the cycle of overpromising and disappointment that has paralyzed American nuclear waste policy for four decades.

I say this as a former Energy Department official who served as federal manager for the Consent-Based Siting Consortia — a $24 million 12-team initiative supporting public engagement around the siting of spent-fuel storage facilities. Before anyone declares the gridlock is broken, the plan must clear five tests.

First, the department must explain the scale of its projections. Its January solicitation offered an illustrative scenario in which one campus employed 50,000 direct workers, generated another 100,000 to 150,000 indirect jobs, and required 10,000 to 20,000 housing units. The same document put the entire existing U.S. nuclear workforce at roughly 80,000. By July, the Energy Department was projecting 25,000 jobs per campus .

Those figures may rest on different assumptions, but the Energy Department has not explained the methodology or reconciled the difference. Numbers that swing this far before a single site is chosen are aspirations, not plans.

Second, the department needs a technically credible schedule. Its solicitation says it wants initial facilities online “in the 2027 timeframe” and promises preference to the states with “more ambitious timelines” — remarkably soon for infrastructure of this kind.

States, meanwhile, had just nine weeks to assemble sweeping proposals. Any serious schedule for the waste disposition component must separately account for geological screening, independent site characterization, groundwater and seismic studies, environmental review, Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, transportation planning and host-agreement negotiation. A facility built to isolate waste for decades, centuries, or millennia cannot be validated on a ribbon-cutting schedule.

Third, Washington must put up real money and enforceable commitments. A repository would, in principle, draw on the federal Nuclear Waste Fund . But for nearly everything else, the department told states to look to private capital — industry, technology firms, private equity, venture funds. It floats possible federal cost-sharing, loan guarantees and grants, but it commits to none and says states and private investors are expected to lead and finance the effort.

Communities asked to keep nuclear waste for generations need money that is committed and obligations that are enforceable against future administrations.

Fourth, Congress must authorize the plan’s spent-fuel storage and disposal components. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act still directs the federal repository program toward Yucca Mountain, whose development Congress has not funded since fiscal 2010 . The act also prevents construction of a centralized federal spent fuel storage facility until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized construction of a repository. The department cannot designate one of the five states as a spent fuel site by press release.

Fifth, host communities must consent. States applied and governors signed, and some local governments in Utah, Idaho and Tennessee have expressed preliminary support. But it is far from clear that any specific community has agreed to live beside nuclear waste facilities.

Genuine consent requires a named candidate community, early involvement rather than after-the-fact persuasion, meaningful say over benefits, the participation of affected Tribal Nations and a real chance to walk away before commitments are final. The Energy Department’s process ran the other way: It gave states nine weeks to name sites and gauge local sentiment and rewarded those promising to streamline permitting and move fast.

After decades in which states treated nuclear waste as politically untouchable, the willingness of five governors to enter the negotiating room is a real achievement. But no spent-fuel repository in any of the five states is authorized under current law, no community has completed a voluntary siting process, no binding host agreement has been signed and no durable financing package or credible schedule has been demonstrated.

When a willing community stays at the table through investigation, negotiation, licensing and construction, the Energy Department will have earned its victory lap. For now, it has earned only the right to begin the hard work of getting there.

Vincent Ialenti is a former U.S. Department of Energy official and a senior research fellow at Tampere University in Finland. He is the author of “Deep Time Reckoning” and “Longstorming,” both from MIT Press.