By Kennedy Maize
For 80 years, the U.S. government and its industrial and utility partners have failed to understand the problem of the noxious and dangerous nuclear waste for war and peace and successfully respond. Kicking the can down the road, evident today with fiscal policy, applied in spades to nuclear waste in wartime and peacetime.
Wartime Waste
It began at Hanford during World War II’s Manhattan Project when little attention was paid to what was left behind when U-235 was stripped from U-238 to turn uranium into plutonium. Nuclear engineers considered it a simple problem that could be dealt with later, much later. The nasty brew of chemical and nuclear poisons was dumped into large, oil-field-derived stainless-steel tanks.
In 1947, pioneering Baltimore “sanitary engineer” Abel Wolman — who had standardized the use of chlorine to purify drinking water — joined the Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory board. Troubled by the accumulation of the wastes, Wolman and a colleague examined the site. What he found the next year was dangerous and poorly managed waste. His warming to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was largely ignored.
By early 1953, Hanford was generating nine million gallons of liquid waste daily. AEC engineers assured management that the storage tanks could not leak. But the tanks started leaking in the 1960s, setting off a continuing cleanup program. According to a March 2025 DOE report, the department has spent $66 billions of taxpayer money on the Hanford cleanup so far, with another $589 billion required to finish the job.
Commercial Nuclear
Enthusiasm for civilian use of nuclear energy kicked off with President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations. In 1955, AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg warned that disposing of the “tremendous quantity” of waste that would result could be a limiting factor for widespread use of nuclear power plants.
The next year, a Wolman-chaired National Academy committee presented several approaches for disposal. In 1957, the academy said the best choice to bury the highly radioactive wastes in underground salt formations. That recommendation set off a more than decade-long search for a suitable site.
The AEC in 1970 settled on salt beds near Lyons in central Kansas. AEC officials neglected to work for local public support, and the Lyons selection set off a political backlash. The local congressman, Republican Rep. Joe Skubitz, launched a political blitzkrieg against the AEC, which aided his cause with a statement arguing that the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act didn’t apply to them.
Disposing of nuclear waste in Kansas became impossible. In May 1971, an official of a salt firm mining told the AEC that the beds were riddled by accumulated oil and gas wells, providing multiple pathways for corrosive water to reach the nuclear waste.
Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) By the mid-1970s, the civilian nuclear power industry was in trouble. Plants were very expensive, political opposition arose, the new plant orders emptied. Congress gutted the AEC, creating the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and, in 1977, the Department of Energy.
The problem of ever-increasing spent nuclear fuel became a DOE problem. President Jimmy Carter (a nuclear engineer) and Jim Schlesinger, Carter’s energy secretary and former Republican AEC chairman, among others, proposed an “away from reactor storage” plan wherein Uncle Sam would take title to utility spent nuclear fuel rods for DOE to store at a temporary site while the feds develop a permanent, underground graveyard.
During 1980, Carter’s last year in office, the House and Senate passed separate nuke waste bills but were unable to reconcile their differences before Congress expired.
Work began again in 1981, with Republican Ronald Reagan in the White House. The GOP held the Senate. Democrats owned the House. Congress again took up nuclear waste, with little interest from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, providing for away from reactor storage and a nationwide search for an acceptable final, underground, but unidentified permanent storage site.
The new law proved wildly unpopular as DOE began investigating various possible locations for a final waste dump. Local ire was fierce and bipartisan. The first Reagan administration ended with no site in sight. DOE workers reviewing possible sites thought the job was technical, but it was far more than that. The politics became so intense that Reagan’s third DOE secretary, Californian John Herrington, concerned about the upcoming 1986 off-year elections, pulled the plug on the siting process in May 1986. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act died unlamented.
Yucca Mountain (Nevada) As Herrington feared, the fall elections saw a Republican thrashing. Democrats controlled the Senate by a 55-45 margin. The House became more solidly Democratic. Nuclear waste was back on the political agenda, with a twist. One of the sites that DOE had examined during the short life of the NWPA was a mountain on vast federal land in Nevada, named Yucca Mountain. It looked promising: remote, dry, no nearby volcanic activity, far away from residents and voters.
Picking up on an idea promoted by Science magazine journalist Luther Carter, Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, Louisiana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and his Idaho Republican colleague, Sen. James McClure, ordered DOE to focus on Yucca Mountain. They attached their provision to an omnibus 1987 government appropriations bill that became law without debate in any committee or on the House or Senate floor.
The nicknamed “Screw Nevada Act” is where the nuclear waste story, to date, ends. Yucca Mountain became a technical and political dead end. Among other problems, the enormous tunnel DOE dug into the mountain showed it wasn’t dry. In 2002, physicist and nuclear expert Victor Gilinsky told a congressional committee of his site visit, “I was pretty surprised therefore to find myself in the middle of this mountain with water dripping out of it and hitting me on the head.”
The Obama administration in 2009 opposed going with Yucca Mountain, urged on by now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada). Industry interests tried to revive it over the years, including in the first Trump administration. In 2020, the Trump White House abandoned Yucca Mountain.
Recent Developments
The Trump Administration’s reform of energy policy has recently reached nuclear waste. A leaked White House document, reported Politico, prioritized the idea of greater state participation for localized, decentralized storage. One federal repository like Yucca Mountain would be deemphasized. According to Politico, “In exchange for bolstering nuclear fuel production and storing waste, the White House indicated states could see a surge of new business, including nuclear power plants and energy-intensive data centers.”
The saga continues.
Kennedy Maize, a Washington, D.C.-based journalist, has covered energy and environmental topics for nearly a half-century. This post, edited and updated here, was originally published at The Quad Report as “Failure: A Short History of U.S. High-level Nuclear Waste Mismanagement.” Maize’s previous posts at MasterResource can be found here.
