No amount of money is worth turning Wyoming into a nuclear waste dump

Wyoming really needs to clone Jeff Steinborn, a New Mexico state lawmaker, or elect someone just like him.

Last year Steinborn, a Democrat, led a successful effort to ban the transportation and storage of high-level nuclear waste in his home state. It would take a GOP version of the legislator to accomplish that in deep-red Wyoming.

One of Steinborn’s main arguments for the ban was economic. He didn’t buy the claims of a private company that planned to build a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel rods near Carlsbad, N.M. Backers had visions of billions of dollars dancing in their heads.

It’s the same dream some Wyoming legislators have embraced — fortunately without success — since the early 1990s. Now the idea has reared its ugly head again. 

Rep. Donald Burkhart Jr. (R-Rawlins) said he will bring a draft bill to October’s Joint Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee to allow a private nuclear waste dump (my description, not his) to be built in Wyoming.

Burkhart, who co-chairs the panel, said the state could reap more than $4 billion a year from nuclear waste storage “just to let us keep it here in Wyoming.” What a sweet deal!

Except the prospect of that much annual revenue may be a tad overstated. It could be about $3.974 billion less than Burkhart suggested, which means the trial balloon he floated won’t get off the ground.

How much money Wyoming could earn for hosting a nuclear waste storage facility is debated whenever the state has a budget crunch and legislators decide it’s time to reap the windfall.

I naively thought whether to establish a temporary “Monitored Retrievable Storage,” as they used to be called, had long been settled in Wyoming. 

In 1992, then-Gov. Mike Sullivan rejected a proposed Fremont County project. Two years later, a University of Wyoming survey found 80% of respondents opposed a high-level nuclear waste facility.

“It makes no sense to me as governor to put this state or its citizens through the agonizing and divisive study and decision-making process of further evaluating the risks of an MRS facility,” Sullivan wrote in a letter to Fremont County commissioners.

Nearly a decade later, Sullivan told the Wyoming Geological Association he’d made the right call. “I had three boxes of letters, pro and con,” the governor recalled. “They were not check-the-box letters. They were coming from people handwritten because of their love of Wyoming and their fear of nuclear [waste].”

In 2019, the Legislative Management Committee narrowly decided — in a secret vote by email — to authorize a Spent Fuel Rods Subcommittee to study the issue. The panel’s chair, Sen. Jim Anderson (R-Casper), said it could be an annual $1 billion bonanza, which certainly captured people’s attention.

The subcommittee’s enthusiasm for such a project sank, though, when it learned the feds were only going to pony up $10 million a year. That figure has since increased, but not by much.

The Department of Energy announced in 2022 that it would make $16 million available to communities interested in learning more about “consent-based siting management of spent nuclear fuel.” Last year President Joe Biden’s administration sweetened the pot to $26 million.

We’ll have to wait until October’s Joint Minerals meeting to find out more details about Burkhart’s proposal. He circulated a rough draft of his bill to members of the committee on July 31, but declined to share it with the public or the media.

Steinborn said there was no financial incentive at all for an interim site in his state. “New Mexico has not been offered anything in the deal,” he told the Milwaukee Independent. “And even if we had, I don’t think any amount of money would convince me that it’s the right thing.”

It’s worth noting that Holtec International, the company that wanted to build the New Mexico project before the ban, chose to put it far away from its own backyard. The firm is based in Mount Laurel, N.J., 1,932 miles from Carlsbad, N.M.

Steinborn told Source NM the nation needs a permanent solution for storing spent nuclear fuel. “But New Mexico can’t just be the convenient sacrifice zone for the country’s contamination,” he said.

And neither should Wyoming. Yes, the U.S. Department of Energy and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates are backing a $4 billion Natrium nuclear power plant near Kemmerer, and BWXT Advanced Technologies is considering establishing a microreactor manufacturing hub. But Wyoming has no obligation to take other states’ nuclear trash.

I can see why some Wyoming legislators want to believe there are billions at the end of the nuclear dump rainbow. The federal government has collected more than $44 billion from energy customers since the 1980s, but the Nuclear Waste Fund was intended to be spent on a permanent facility. Temporary facilities, like what Burkhart proposes, don’t rake in the big bucks.

The feds have spent around $9 billion to pay interim nuke storage costs at the 80 current and former nuclear reactor sites located in 35 states, where a total of 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is stored. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Agency Finance Report estimated it will cost more than $30 billion until a permanent waste disposal option is completed.

But it’s increasingly unlikely a permanent site will ever be built. Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was chosen by Congress in 1987, but it’s been tangled up in a web of political and scientific controversies that continue today. 

In addition to strong opposition from the state of Nevada, former President Barack Obama convinced Congress in 2011 to stop funding the project.

There is a significant legal obstacle to siting a “temporary” waste site in Wyoming or anywhere else. Congress would have to amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which prohibits the Department of Energy from designating an interim storage site without a viable plan to establish a permanent deep-mined geologic repository — like the Yucca Mountain project, but one that could actually be approved and built.

Victor Gilinsky, former consultant for the state of Nevada, investigated the Yucca Mountain project. In a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article last month, he offered this observation: “I don’t think any state would ever trust the Energy Department to build and operate a nuclear waste repository.”

Why in the world do Wyoming legislators who brag about their distrust of  federal government — and in some cases even argue we shouldn’t take its money at all — see nothing wrong with a federal agency managing nuclear waste here? They’ve turned down an estimated $1.4 billion for Medicaid expansion since 2013, but they’re willing to take peanuts from the federal government to be a nuclear dumping ground?

Jill Morrison, a retired landowner advocate who has lobbied against similar proposals since the 1990s, told WyoFile lawmakers are trying to sneak in this one “and ram it through.”

“It threatens public safety and it’s really going to wreck Wyoming’s national reputation and image as a destination for tourism and recreation — a beautiful place to visit or live,” Morrison said.

I’ve read suggestions on the internet that Wyoming could make a nuclear waste facility a tourist attraction.

I reckon something that exciting could at least draw half of the 4.5 million Yellowstone visitors we get each year. Charge ‘em $1,088 each, the average price of a Taylor Swift concert ticket. That would bring in a cool $2.4 billion.

That’s not as much as Burkhart said we’d reap, but it’s about as realistic.