By Leia Larsen | The Salt Lake Tribune | Photo by Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune 

There aren’t many nuclear power plants in the West – just one each in Washington, California and Arizona – at least not yet.

TerraPower, backed by the billionaire Bill Gates, is in the process of building a plant in Wyoming, and is currently scouting potential locations in Utah. And just last week, Gov. Spencer Cox joined other elected officials to announce a nuclear “hub” coming to Brigham City in the next decade, which will include two small modular reactors and a manufacturing plant to help build them throughout the Intermountain region.

Utahns understandably have a lot of questions and concerns about a decades-old energy source that is suddenly getting a lot of buzz. Fortunately, they don’t have to look to far to get some answers — the nation’s longtime leading research center for nuclear energy lies just a few hours’ drive north, at the Idaho National Laboratory.

I got a chance to tour the facility’s massive campus in September (it covers almost 900 square miles!), when the laboratory and Gov. Spencer Cox hosted a Western Governors’ Association workshop on the region’s energy future.

(Read my story recapping the event: Nuclear energy could be the ‘holy grail’ for the West’s rising energy demands)

Cox has zeroed in on nuclear as a key component for meeting Utah’s power needs, which are about to become supercharged with the rise of artificial intelligence, the construction of massive data centers throughout the state and the electrification of major sectors, including transportation.

There’s good news for Cox and other fission enthusiasts: The rest of the nation appears to be warming to nuclear, too.

A Pew Research Center poll published last month found 59% of U.S. adults support more nuclear power in the nation, up from 43% in 2020. But for those who remain wary, the toxic waste that results from the process was among the top three concerns. And general safety remains the primary worry giving Americans pause.

John Wagner, Idaho National Laboratory’s director, sat down to answer some of my burning questions about nuclear’s future, including what we might do with all the leftovers.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What has the Idaho National Laboratory been doing all these decades while nuclear energy development mostly sat idle?

We’ve been doing a lot, actually. We’ve mostly been focused on the current fleet (of nuclear plants), developing fuels and components for advanced reactors. We’ve been developing new fuel forms. One is called TRISO fuel, an extremely robust fuel form that’s essentially impossible to melt or have any release in an accident scenario. We’ve also been furthering our performance data for metallic fuels in support of companies like Oklo and TerraPower.

Some lay people like myself have questions about storage of spent fuel and what’s going to happen with waste. How do you handle that here at the lab?

People are right to worry about spent nuclear fuels, but nuclear is the only energy source where we know where every gram of waste product that we’ve ever generated is, because we have to store it safely.

The only spent fuel that we generate here is from the Advanced Test Reactor. It’s the highest-power thermal test reactor in the world, and our process is similar to what a commercial facility does. We store it under water for a year or more. Water provides shielding. It also provides cooling, because fuel assemblies come out of the reactor very, very hot. Then we securely store it in dry storage cells. It’s not so much material that it’s unmanageable – that’s the beauty of nuclear, there’s not that much spent fuel.

When you say “securely store it,” do you mean underground? In a bunker somewhere?

It’s in a managed building; it’s above ground. You can look through a window and see it, similar to what you’ll see at our Hot Fuel Examination Facility (a building at the lab where researchers can observe and manipulate irradiated materials, or objects exposed to radiation). But you would see a whole bunch of nothing because it’s stored in compartments.

We could store it like this forever if we chose to do that.

And why wouldn’t we choose to do that, if it’s safe?

Because it doesn’t really feel good to people. It seems like you ought to do something permanent with it. I worked on the Yucca Mountain project, which was (supposed to be) the nation’s geologic disposal site in Nevada. I have every confidence we could have done that safely. Policy-wise, we decided not to.

Is Yucca Mountain totally off the table, or could plans to finish building that facility restart?

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (has said since 1987) that Yucca Mountain is where the nation will dispose of nuclear fuel. But we have not worked on it since 2010.

Politics and perceptions about nuclear, however, seem to be rapidly changing.

It seems it will come down to the politics of Nevada. But nobody’s been harmed by any spent nuclear fuel. It’s not green goo, it’s metal rods. To manage it, we could do three things. We could safely store it where it’s generated or at interim sites. We could (bury) it at a place like Yucca Mountain. Or we could start recycling it.

Now we’re talking about quadrupling capacity by 2050 (President Donald Trump signed executive orders incentivizing more nuclear plants in May). So we will be generating a lot more (spent fuel) and it may make sense to invest in recycling infrastructure.

Can you explain to someone who’s not an engineer how you recycle nuclear material?

The current reactors are bundles of fuel rods. Those rods are about as big around as your pinky, and they’re very long, almost like pieces of (dry) spaghetti, but around 14 feet. These rods are all put together in a square array. So it’s a bunch of metal rods, and the metal is typically zirconium, used as a cladding material. Inside is the magic part, the uranium oxide. The metal is intended to keep that contained.

the fuel in acid and turn the uranium oxide into a liquid form. It’s all chemistry at that point. You separate what you want from what you don’t want. What you don’t want are the products that aren’t fissionable, or fuel material.

And that would be considered a waste stream that’s still radioactive?

Yes. Sometimes people say we should just recycle all the spent nuclear fuel, then we wouldn’t need any kind of long-term geologic disposal. That is not true, you still have a waste stream that you must deal with.

Now, one of the benefits of recycling is the radioactivity of our current spent fuel is on the order of thousands of years. When you recycle, the not-useful stuff, or waste, tends to be more on the order of hundreds of years. So geologic disposal could be engineered on the scale of hundreds of years instead of thousands of years.

Does the reluctance to recycle, and the pause on building more nuclear capacity in general over the decades, have roots in the Cold War and fears over bomb proliferation?

There are different pieces here. On the energy side, a decision was made that it’s a mature industry and we don’t need to do much research anymore. But that was the main theme on recycling – concern about weapons material. You might think uranium would be a weapons concern. It’s really not, because it’s not that high of enriched material. It’s the plutonium, which you can separate out. Pure plutonium would be well-suited for a weapon.

The reality is, that’s an overstated concern, because the amount and quality of plutonium coming out of any commercial power reactor is not very good.

Has it just taken politicians and policymakers a while to understand that?

Yes and no. Recycling is not cost effective. Unless there’s a financial incentive or a policy driver, we won’t do it. Uranium is cheap to mine and convert and enrich, relative to the investment in a facility where you’re chopping up spent fuel bundles and dissolving them.

What we would need to get recycling going is one of two things: Either the economics would have to change, and then the private sector would move in that direction, or the government would have to play a major role. So far, they have not.

This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.