The Secret Weapon for Energy Dominance: Nuclear Waste
The Secret Weapon for Energy Dominance: Nuclear Waste
If the Trump administration is serious about energizing the American Golden Age, there’s an obvious path forward.
The Trump administration is perhaps the most pro-nuclear administration America has seen since Eisenhower. The president has made energy dominance a linchpin of his economic agenda; his energy secretary, Chris Wright, considers unleashing the atom vital for unlocking a Golden Age of American energy.
This couldn’t come at a better time. After decades of flat power demand, electricity demand in the United States is estimated to increase by 128,000 megawatts, or 15 percent, over the next five years—and that’s on the low end of projections. Green energy policies, however, have weakened the American grid, leaving the country vulnerable to Spanish-style energy shortfalls. As the CEO of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, John Bear, put it, “We have to face some hard realities … the transition that is underway to get to a decarbonized end state is posing material, adverse challenges to electric reliability.”
America has been struggling to keep the lights on, let alone handle the oncoming wave of demand from manufacturing and AI data centers. While we have normally relied on natural gas for its firm power and quick deployment, lead times on turbines and gas plants stretch beyond the five-year mark.
Thus America needs nuclear if it wants to win the AI race and power the new golden age of manufacturing.
Luckily, the White House, tech elites, and trade unions all share a renewed enthusiasm for nuclear. Plus, a bevy of new nuclear reactors are set to debut innovative designs on American soil. These “SMRs,” or small modular reactors, plan to build their components in factories and then assemble them on site wherever needed, driving down construction costs and avoiding the nasty surprises that crop up in a prolonged construction environment. That’s why major tech companies like Amazon and Google have partnered with SMR companies like X-Energy and Kairos, respectively.
But America doesn’t currently have the fuel resources to power many of many of these new designs. Thanks to years of misguided policies, the United States has become dependent on countries like Russia and Kazakhstan for uranium and its enrichment. We have taken some steps to remedy this problem by incentivizing domestic fuel production, but there’s a solution sitting right under its nose that could unlock energy dominance in perpetuity while fueling the nuclear renaissance.
The United States currently has 90,000 metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel, or nuclear waste. Despite its negative reputation, the waste sits safely in big concrete casks at nuclear power plants across the country. (In fact, consumers pay utilities to keep it there.) But we’re wasting the waste: Ninety-five percent of the material it contains can be reprocessed to serve as fuel for the oncoming fleet of advanced reactors. If we reprocessed our waste, then we could unlock five times the energy of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves, all while reducing the waste by 90 percent and driving down Americans’ bills.
In fact, we already have firms working on making this economically viable, like Oklo and Curio. These companies are employing new methods of reprocessing, like pyroprocessing, which was pioneered at our national labs. This new technique, essentially heating the waste at high temperatures in order to harvest useful materials like fuel, is cheaper and more efficient than the methods used by other countries with waste recycling programs, like Japan or France.
Moreover, Congress is already on board with reprocessing. The Nuclear REFUEL Act has bipartisan support and aims to adjust the regulatory framework to unleash this burgeoning industry.
But the nation needs direction that only President Trump can provide. If Trump flexed his executive muscles, he could issue an executive order that establishes reprocessing as a national priority for energy dominance. Effectively, the president would mandate the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the State Department step out of the way of commercial entities that want to harvest and clean up our waste in order to produce more fuel.
By establishing waste reprocessing as part of the national mission, Trump would shore up our energy security while locking in American energy dominance for generations.
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