Idaho is Being Sold a Dump, Not a Future

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Does the “innovation” pitch match the radioactive reality?

DOE/INL 1969 Waste Dumping.

By Leigh Ford, Snake River Alliance

The Department of Energy (DOE) has a problem. They have a nuclear addiction and a growing mountain of toxic, radioactive waste. To solve it, they are eyeing Idaho once again. Governor Little recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the DOE, and they are trying to sell it to us as a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Hub.”

We’re not buying it. This is a nuclear dump dressed up as an “innovation campus,” and DOE is simply hoping that the temptation of jobs and billions of dollars will convince us to turn Idaho into America’s nuclear waste dump.

Recently, I sat down with Roland Beres, who wanted to get the Snake River Alliance’s reaction to the Governor’s signing the MOU with DOE. Roland has a lot of experience following nuclear issues. Notably, he covered events leading up to the Idaho Settlement Agreement, when Governors Batt and Andrus were fighting the feds for sending out-of-state radioactive waste into Idaho. That history matters, because it tells us this isn’t a new fight—it’s the same fight, with slicker marketing.

Today’s political machinery is quickly paving the way for Manhattan Project 2.0, endangering our health and silencing local opposition. Per Executive Order 14300, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is revising radiation standards and reducing protections for workers and communities. Idaho’s Senate passed SCR 120 to claim that reprocessing nuclear waste fits into the Idaho Settlement Agreement framework. Not to be left out, Idaho’s House passed HB 714, which prohibits local governments from saying “NO” to these dumps and reprocessing facilities in their communities.

The Nuclear Myths

The first myth is money. The DOE isn’t handing Idaho billions of dollars. According to their own request for proposals, they are looking for projects that *prioritize private and state capital*. They offer “targeted, conditional, and time‑limited federal support.” In other words, Idaho taxpayers are on the hook for the cost, while the feds offer a loan and a promise to protect themselves from “open-ended liabilities.”

The second myth is the jobs. Idaho’s response to DOE’s request states we already have the infrastructure and can start fast. That translates to fewer construction jobs. And while the Tech bros designing these untested reactors are boasting that they “practically run themselves,” that means they aren’t going to hire many permanent workers. The promise of “thousands of jobs” is a mirage. We might fix a few roads, but beyond that, thousands of long-term jobs are far-fetched.

The third myth is the waste. Our radioactive legacy can still be seen out at the site in the Arco Desert. Last year, when the Snake River Alliance visited Idaho National Lab I noticed the waste we got from the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 is still there, sitting in huge concrete sarcophagi. We saw a warehouse stacked with barrels of waste, much from the Rocky Flats bomb factory—barrels that needed to be recategorized because we have no idea what Colorado actually shipped us. We drove around the 90-acre burial grounds, where a “thousand-year cap” will be placed.

Governor Little might say “that’s all been cleaned up,” but that is dangerously deceptive. We can’t completely clean up nuclear waste. INL has done a good job mitigating a lot of it, but the truth is there is no permanent nuclear waste repository in the country. The waste just keeps piling up, mostly at nuclear power plants back east, and if that waste comes here, it will stay in Idaho permanently. The DOE has a track record of broken promises, and they are not to be trusted.

A Dangerous Bet 

Some politicians and nuclear cheerleaders claim we can reprocess our way out of this. We cannot. Some point to the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) facility in New Mexico, but it only takes defense-related transuranic waste, and was never meant to be permanent. There have already been two 10-year extensions since 2010, and New Mexico isn’t a solution for Idaho’s burden. New Mexicans don’t want a permanent nuclear dump either.

Idaho is being asked to accept a permanent nuclear burden in exchange for a few temporary construction jobs and mythical money. The waste isn’t leaving. The feds and the nuclear industry have had decades to solve this, and they haven’t. We shouldn’t be the dumping ground for their failures. It is time to reject this dangerous bet and demand a real plan that doesn’t put our people, water, and land at further risk.

Idaho is not America’s dumping ground – not for cash, not for jobs, and not for nuclear waste that outlives our great, great grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Heatwave hell

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Republished with permission from Beyond Nuclear International, find original article here.

You would think after the last several weeks we just had, the promoters of nuclear power might be tempering their messages a little. Or even reconsidering their position if they haven’t yet drunk too many gallons of the nuclear Kool-Aid.

But what we are seeing instead is a continued and relentless propaganda campaign re-affirming the “milestones” and “breakthroughs” of new nuclear power projects.

For example, Deep Fission, with its plans to try to drop what could eventually be as many as 100 15MW micro reactors down mile-deep boreholes in the tiny community of Parsons, Kansas (population 9,600), crowed about a recent approval from the US Department of Energy.

Water sources are drying up under climate crisis conditions, but the nuclear bros and their willing political accomplices carry on as if heatwaves, droughts and wildfires simply aren’t happening, ignoring the immense risks they pose to nuclear plants now — and into the future when conditions will be even worse.

What the DOE approved was the company’s Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for its Gravity™ Nuclear Reactor. Deep Fission described this as “a major regulatory milestone.”

What it really amounts to is permission to keep on doodling on the napkin, or, put less snarkily, that they may proceed with their reactor design.

Holtec, the New Jersey-based waste and decommissioning company announced late last month that with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) having granted a License Termination Plan for the closed Oyster Creek Generating Station, the company can now move forward with plans to site four of its SMR-300 reactors at the site.

Collectively, this represents a bigger output than the old 650 MW Oyster Creek reactor, but of course SMR owners are claiming that because their reactors are so much smaller, there need be no emergency evacuation zone or other disaster preparedness beyond the property fence line.

Because after all, what kind of disaster could possibly occur?

Evidently, none of these reactor bros touting their scammy crypto-nukes have been watching the news, since they are just carrying on as if Nothing Happened.

So what didn’t they see? The Romanians dynamiting the Danube river in a desperate attempt to redirect the ever scarcer river water toward their lone Cernavoda nuclear power plant? One reactor there was already closed and now the second one is, as well, as the Danube suffered another drastic drop in water level.

Map provided by ERCC – Emergency Response Coordination Centre/Wikimedia Commons.

That in turn has affected neighboring Moldova which “relies on Romanian power to cover up to 60% of its own electricity shortages,” according to reporting in The Guardian. The loss of Cernavoda could result in power outages, Moldovan authorities warned.

In Hungary, the Paks nuclear power plant was operating at around 10% of its 2,000 MW capacity at time of writing and the Hungarians, like the Romanians, were starting to sink large barges in what is left of the Danube to try to raise water levels and continue to cool the plant.

Then there was the scorched heathland and billowing smoke that obscured the view of the Sizewell nuclear power plant on the English coast just a few miles away. The raging wildfire close to the still operating Sizewell B reactor was a close call, another stroke of luck with the wind blowing the other way. That day.

The nearby precious Minsmere Nature Reserve hasn’t been so lucky, with the fires causing a massive loss of wildlife and habitat. But plans to proceed with the two French Sizewell C EPR reactors have not been abandoned and the UK government insanely granted Sizewell B a 20-year license extension on top of its existing one that would allow it to operate out to 2055.

The plant actually sits on the beach, never mind the fact that climate crisis-caused drastic sea-level rise is an empirical inevitability. And, apparently, never mind the wildfires either, which, with the United Kingdom now in its fifth scorching heatwave of the summer, are only likely to get larger and more frequent.

Exceptionally low water levels in rivers across Europe (August 2026 near Bingen, at the confluence of the Rhine and Nahe rivers shown here) are causing critical shortages of cooling water at nuclear power plants , forcing them to power or shut down. (Photo: ThoBel-0043/Wikimedia Commons.)

Maybe the nuke bros also missed the people fleeing for their lives across Europe while headlines reminded these hapless refugees and others roasting in cities, towns and countryside that their nuclear power plants would not be available to provide the much-needed electricity at a time it was needed most. Instead, people sweltered, and, in some cases, died, from the extreme heat, their villages in some places burned to the ground.

France had to power down and even close many of its reactors due to the extreme heat and then, of course, came the climate change-caused jellyfish swarm at Gravelines, now looking to be an annual event, causing those reactors to close. Jellyfish are a problem because they clog the cooling water intake system.

Meanwhile, parts of the US have been on fire, too, while smoke from Canadian wildfires a few weeks back enveloped a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast in a choking cloud of acrid smoke and falling ash.

So far, and fortunately, there have been no nuclear power plants in the paths of these fires — or some of the catastrophic flooding, including in Texas.

But it really doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to picture a very different scenario.

Nuclear power plants can’t operate well — or sometimes at all— in extreme heat or drought because they require water to cool them and that water needs actually to be cool in the first place. And available.

If the water is too hot or too scarce, nuclear power plants have to reduce power or even shut down altogether.

But when they do, it’s not like turning off a car engine. Because of the highly radioactive and thermally hot fuel inside nuclear reactors —and the fuel pools into which the irradiated fuel rods have been offloaded — they still need cooling. If you can’t cool them, they will eventually melt down. So water must continue to be available and so must electricity to get it there and power the plant.

That is why we have argued for years that nuclear power plants are not reliable, especially in extreme weather conditions. Instead, they are a liability. And with ever more violent weather conditions under the climate crisis, those risks are only going to get worse and disaster more likely.

The events on March 11, 2011 in Japan would have been infinitely less catastrophic, and a whole lot less expensive, if they hadn’t involved a triple nuclear meltdown along with the massive earthquake and tsunami. And, as with Sizewell, they would have been infinitely worse radiologically, had the wind been blowing the other way. Despite this, vast areas received radioactive fallout, complicating rescue efforts of those caught in the earthquake and/or the tsunami.

Fire is one of the biggest risks at a nuclear power plant, largely because of the lethal radioactive inventory on the site. “Irradiation produces a variety of fission products and actinides that multiply the radioactivity in the original uranium fuel by more than 100 million times,” according to The World Nuclear Waste Report (see page 27) published in 2019 by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. All of this waste currently remains at US reactor sites and at most such around the world, absent a safe, long-term storage solution.

If a raging wildfire engulfed a reactor site, the outcome could be catastrophic, rendering vast areas uninhabitable. Another Chernobyl Zone could be born.

If a fire engulfed a solar or wind farm, that would be a nuisance. The panels or turbines would need to be replaced. But no one would be at risk of thyroid cancer or worse, nor would they need to flee, abandoning their homes and land forever.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the Executive Director of Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. She is the author of the book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press. Any opinions are her own.

 

Headline photo: During the first week of June 2009, Sustainable Resource Alberta burned nearly 8,000 hectares of forest in Western Alberta, just east of the Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Icefields Parkway and Highway 11. The forest was destroyed to bring about greater diversity, stem the spread of mountain pine beetle and to create a fire barrier for any future wild fires. by Cameron Strandberg/Wikimedia Commons.

Experts Plea To Congress: Beware of Fed and Big Tech’s Costly Nuclear Power Push

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By The Nuclear Skeptic

The artificial intelligence bubble is starving for electricity so big tech is teaming up with the administration to “Make America Nuclear Again” – an unaffordable, dangerous alliance forming behind closed doors inside the nation’s capital to resurrect an economically broken and hazardous industry.

Thankfully lawmakers are starting to hear the other side of this story. At a Capitol Hill briefing earlier this month, an esteemed panel of scientific, legal, and regulatory experts issued a stark warning to lawmakers: the rush to expand nuclear energy by gutting safety regulations poses catastrophic risks to public safety, national security, and global climate resilience and will thwart affordability goals. Hosted by Ralph Nader and organized by Beyond Nuclear and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), the briefing presented a sobering look at an industry attempting to bypass democratic oversight with the full backing of the Trump White House.

The core driver of this massive atomic push is the artificial intelligence bubble, allowing speculative tech companies with little to no experience building nuclear power plants to assume huge amounts of debt, set aside climate goals, and drive the electricity grid to the brink of collapse. Physicist and former Department of Energy Under Secretary, Dr. Joe Romm, explained how tech’s hunger for baseload electricity is driving a calculated strategy that blocks affordable renewable energy deployment in favor of continued fossil-fuel generation and fast-tracked nuclear development. To build reactors quickly, the administration is aggressively pushing to curtail the authority and independence of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford warned that stripping the agency of its oversight is an alarming step backward for an already compromised regulator. Nuclear proponents seek to rubber-stamp unproven reactor designs and bypass long-standing public health and environmental protections.

The industry’s aspirations rely heavily on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and “advanced” fast-reactor designs, marketed by billionaires as inherently safe and revolutionary. However, Dr. M.V. Ramana, a professor at the University of British Columbia, dismantled these claims during the briefing. He emphasized that deregulation will not magically solve nuclear power’s chronic history of multi-billion-dollar cost overruns and decades-long construction delays, pointing to the financial disaster of Plant Vogtle in Georgia as a prime example of the industry’s systemic failure.

Adding a chilling dimension to the briefing, Dr. Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists sounded the alarm on the administration’s unprecedented plan to distribute Cold War-era surplus plutonium to private startups, such as Oklo, for fuel. Lyman warned that treating weapons-usable plutonium as a standard commercial commodity bypasses rigorous safety analyses, introducing severe public safety and nuclear proliferation hazards that haven’t been seen in decades.

The briefing also emphasized how fast-tracking nuclear power actively undermines climate adaptation. Environmental attorney Diane Curran illustrated that by circumventing crucial federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the NRC is completely failing to account for how climate-driven weather hazards—such as severe flooding, droughts, and extreme temperatures—imperil reactor stability over their lifespans.

Furthermore, Sharon Squassoni of George Washington University highlighted the ominous militarization of the civil nuclear sector. Civil reactors are now being prepared to power military installations and kinetic AI weapon systems. Squassoni warned that this blurring of civilian and military lines enables developers to sidestep traditional NRC regulation entirely, heightening global weapons proliferation risks and setting a dangerous international precedent.

Ultimately, the panel of experts concluded that sacrificing public safety to satisfy the short-term power demands of tech conglomerates is a profound and potentially catastrophic mistake. While the nuclear industry peddles speculative “paper” reactor designs that will take decades to materialize, safe, reliable, and affordable renewable energy can be deployed rapidly today. The briefing left lawmakers with a crystal-clear message: the public must not bear the existential and financial risks of an unregulated atomic grift.