NYE COUNTY, Nev. — The desert heat simmers as we gather at the tunnel entrance. Sunlight sharp enough to bleach color from the hills washes over a low, unassuming ridge of volcanic tuff. The decades-old signage remains — U.S. Department of Energy, Yucca Mountain Project — set beside a hulking tunnel-boring machine nicknamed the “Yucca Mucker.” 

Yucca Mountain sits within the Nevada National Security Sites, a landscape shaped by more than 900 nuclear weapons detonations conducted between 1951 and 1992. Hardhats on, flashlights in hand, we prepare to enter an underground facility designed to seal radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and federal defense programs away from future war, disaster, neglect, sabotage and human curiosity.

The blast door opens. The air is cool and dry. As the tunnel draws us into the dark, I notice a metal ventilation duct running overhead like a spine. Rails underfoot — laid for waste transport systems that never entered service — guide us deeper into the mountain. Ringtail footprints stipple the dust. Outdated signs announce blasting protocols: long blasts, short blasts, all-clear. A placard marks the Ghost Dance Fault where it cuts across the tunnel, beside alcoves that once housed hydrologic, geochemical and rock-mechanics experiments.

The repository was designed to outlast U.S. sovereignty. It was built to entomb radionuclides such as plutonium-239, with a half-life exceeding 24,000 years, and uranium-235, with a half-life extending beyond 700 million years. But no nuclear waste canister was ever buried here. As we walk through the 5-mile tunnel of the now-defunct desert underworld, my thoughts drift not to its intended futures, but to the turbulent churn of court rulings, licensing thresholds and statutory constraints that foreclosed them.

Nuclear waste now lies stranded across 39 states at more than 100 locations, more than 70 of which contain spent fuel (nuclear fuel that has been used in a reactor). Surrounding communities never agreed to host it indefinitely. What exists, in effect, is a fragmentary storage system: costly, redundant, lacking public consent and without a destination for humanity’s longest-lived refuse. 

I visited Yucca Mountain in June 2023 while serving in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, where I led public engagement efforts and integrated social science research into the government’s national laboratories. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, I have spent more than 15 years examining the temporal, political and cultural dimensions of nuclear waste governance.

Through it all, I have come to see Yucca Mountain as an austere monument to an American political order capable of engineering structures to last for hundreds of millennia, yet incapable of upholding commitments for mere decades. 

The repository is a solemn emblem of an age in which the temporalities of democracy, geology and megaproject design stubbornly refuse to align. In that misalignment lies a civilizational diagnosis: a widening gulf between the intergenerational obligations nuclear waste creates and the volatile rhythms through which American democracy governs the future.

Governing Beyond Whiplash

The nuclear energy fuel cycle begins with uranium mining and fuel fabrication: ceramic pellets of low-enriched uranium oxide stacked into rods, bundled into assemblies and loaded into reactors. A typical fuel assembly stays in a reactor for roughly five years. Once discharged, it remains highly radioactive and hot. The spent nuclear fuel must cool in surface or near-surface storage for decades before it can be buried for perpetuity in a geological repository. In practice, these interim periods extend much longer. No country has yet brought a spent fuel repository into operation. 

The U.S. nuclear reactor fleet generates about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel per year. About 95,000 metric tons have piled up since the 1950s. The government had initially planned to screen multiple sites across the country for two separate repositories, but in 1987, amid political pressures, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to confine siting to just one location: Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nevada. This amendment became known as the “Screw Nevada Bill.”

Surveys conducted during the project’s peak showed an absence of trust across affected parties — local communities, state officials, tribal government and so on. Social scientists criticized the federal government’s top-down siting approach as “decide-announce-defend.” Physical scientists flagged concerns about future seismicity, volcanism and groundwater flow. Nevada responded with legal and political resistance. Even so, the government pressed ahead, and in 2002, the Bush Administration approved the project. 

“What exists, in effect, is a fragmentary storage system: costly, redundant, lacking public consent and without a destination for humanity’s longest-lived refuse.”

A decades-long drama of stop-start governance ensued. Programs were launched and dismantled. Policies were struck down and rebranded. Initiatives were announced, abandoned and revived as administrations turned over. The saga of twists and turns was strikingly out of sync with the centurial planning horizons of a geological repository project, as well as the slow thermodynamic burn of the radioactive half-life.

In 2009, under pressure from then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Obama Administration withdrew funding for the Yucca Mountain project. In 2012, its Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future proposed a different course grounded in voluntary participation and community consent. The commission urged the Energy Department to draw lessons from other countries such as Canada, Finland and Sweden, where repository programs advanced through a more deliberative process. 

In early 2016, the Obama Administration launched a “consent-based siting” program to find a new repository site. Then, in 2017, the Trump Administration shelved it. Trump briefly considered reviving the Yucca plan, but once the idea stalled in Congress, he realigned with Nevada officials’ resistance.

In 2021, the Biden Administration resuscitated the Obama Administration’s consent-based siting effort, but this time with a less ambitious remit: The Energy Department was not to identify a site for a geological repository, but rather sites for one or more “federal consolidated interim storage facilities” intended to centralize spent fuel from the many redundant storage sites where it had accumulated nationwide. 

Again, the momentum was fleeting. In early 2025, the second Trump Administration set aside the “consent-based siting” idiom in favor of what it termed “collaboration-based siting.” About a year later, Trump’s Energy Department unveiled an entirely new plan. It invited states to express interest in hosting “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses” — regional hubs for the co-location of advanced reactors, fuel fabrication, uranium enrichment, nuclear waste disposition and, potentially, spent fuel reprocessing facilities. In this framing, deep geological repositories were recast as part of a broader federal economic development package that coupled nuclear energy expansion with nuclear waste facility siting. 

The Trump Administration’s collaboration-based siting push coincided with yet another paradigm shift: the return of spent nuclear fuel reprocessing to the U.S. policy horizon. Reprocessing chemically separates plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel, allowing portions of that material to be reused. This would reduce the overall volume and radiotoxicity of America’s spent fuel.

However, reprocessing also generates radioactive materials usable in weapons. While a Carter-era policy to defer civilian reprocessing was reversed by the Reagan Administration in 1981, no reprocessing industry ever took root in the United States — put off by regulatory obstacles, financial considerations and security concerns. 

If reprocessing is someday adopted at scale, the need for a deep geological disposal will not vanish. A substantial fraction of the reprocessed spent fuel will remain irreducibly hazardous, requiring isolation for timeframes that exceed any regulatory regime known to humanity. 

Simply put, the story of 21st century U.S. nuclear waste policy is a story of political whiplash. Nuclear waste regulation must extend across millennia. Spent fuel facilities require stewardship across generations backed up by firm long-term commitments. Yet the agencies implementing nuclear waste policy are vulnerable to shifting presidential priorities and congressional preferences. The result is a fragile promissory regime unable to reconcile the accumulative temporalities of its ecological inheritances with the rapid-fire institutional rhythms through which it builds its future.  

This temporal disjuncture has eroded the government’s credibility in issuing long-term assurances. A community asked to host a nuclear waste facility for decades or centuries must be able to trust that the federal promises made today will still hold tomorrow. But what grounds this trust when presidential priorities drive recurrent paradigm shifts across four-year electoral cycles? How durable are the covenants of an agency subject to turbulent cabinet-level politics and mercurial annual congressional appropriations? 

With these questions unanswered, America’s nuclear waste agenda will continue to be hindered by the same knot of political agonism, legal obstruction and institutional desynchrony, regardless of which political faction occupies the Oval Office.

Architectures Of Immobility

During the Biden Administration, I served as federal manager of the Energy Department’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia, a nationwide coalition of 12 project teams drawn from universities, nonprofits and the private sector. Each was working to facilitate civic participation in nuclear waste storage facility siting.

The consortia met citizens where public life unfolded, from faith organizations and labor unions to school districts, veterans’ groups, philanthropic foundations, libraries and local environmental organizations. They worked with development districts, mayors, council members, advisory committees, chambers of commerce and workforce boards. In hosted conversations across communities, people spoke about what it might mean to host a facility in their backyards. 

“The repository is a solemn emblem of an age in which the temporalities of democracy, geology and megaproject design stubbornly refuse to align.”

Within the department, the consortia signaled a cautious turn toward a more holistic mode of decision-making that pushed far beyond the bounds of traditional policy consultation. One team, led by Arizona State University, convened an event that brought fiction authors and essayists into the conversation. Others organized economic visioning and workforce development workshops. The consortia’s Good Energy Collective team ran Spanish-language programs in minority-majority communities — providing childcare, meals and stipends to lower barriers to participation.

Across the consortia, teams worked with tribal nations, governors’ offices and state agencies. This helped lay a social, political and informational foundation for resolving America’s spent fuel stalemate. It did so by opening hearts and minds to an optimistic vision of a more integrated national nuclear waste system.

Beneath this progressive experiment in democratic repair, however, lay an understructure of institutional paralysis.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act bars the construction of consolidated interim storage facilities — the same facilities the consortia were funded to converse with the public about — until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issues a license for a repository. With Yucca Mountain defunct, the Energy Department is prohibited from building either type of facility. This means the consortia could help communities listen, map, deliberate and plan, but could never credibly assure them that the facilities they were being asked to imagine hosting would ever be built. 

From the outside, this may seem absurd: Why would the government fund a $24 million program to raise awareness about facilities that, under current law, are illegal to construct? 

Paradoxes like these are, unfortunately, commonplace in the American nuclear waste regime — a labyrinthine apparatus in which the temporalities of law, bureaucracy and politics too often desynchronize with the long-horizon systems integration that nuclear waste demands. Part of the reason lies in the financial incentives that uphold it. 

In 1982, Congress established the Nuclear Waste Fund to finance the federal government’s obligation to dispose of spent fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. The fund required nuclear utilities to pay a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. In return, the Energy Department had to begin disposing of spent fuel by the end of January 1998. When the department failed to do so, the utilities turned to the courts.

Since then, utilities have received a steady stream of court-ordered, taxpayer-funded reimbursements for storing spent fuel in dozens of sites around the country. These judgments have already cost American taxpayers more than $12 billion, with projected federal liabilities estimated at $38.6 billion to $44.3 billion. 

This liability regime has restructured the political economy of U.S. nuclear waste in ways that do not favor the rapid resolution of the current stalemate. Opening a repository would give the nuclear industry an answer to a perennial question from its critics: What will be done with the long-lived waste? But it would also trigger large-scale shipments of spent fuel across railways, highways and waterways — reopening contentious questions about transportation routes, community consent, tribal sovereignty and public safety.

For some operating within the liability regime, the low-visibility status quo of taxpayer-funded, decentralized storage may be easier to live with than a renewed national fight over where the waste goes, and how it gets there.

This tension is sharpened by the institutional placement of the national spent fuel program itself. Housed in the Office of Nuclear Energy, which has an official mandate to promote reactor innovation and deployment, nuclear waste progress tends to advance only insofar as it does not disrupt prevailing industrial priorities. 

Congressional action to decouple the Nuclear Waste Policy Act from Yucca Mountain — and to remove America’s spent fuel program from the Office of Nuclear Energy — would help unshackle America’s nuclear waste futures from its condition of managed immobility. Until then, nuclear waste will continue to accumulate year after year, with no final resting place in sight.

Designing For Duration

In a polarized America, the recent bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear power has been a unique convergence. Nuclear energy is increasingly seen as a solution for climate mitigation, grid reliability, national security, economic growth and the surging electricity demands of AI data centers.

The Biden Administration linked nuclear expansion to ambitious climate benchmarks: cutting emissions to at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030, reaching 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035 and achieving a net-zero economy by mid-century. The Trump Administration has pushed further still, calling for construction on at least 10 new reactors by 2030 and quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity to roughly 400 gigawatts by 2050. Each new reactor will bind future generations to growing volumes of spent fuel. 

“A substantial fraction of the reprocessed spent fuel will remain irreducibly hazardous, requiring isolation for timeframes that exceed any regulatory regime known to humanity.”

Effective nuclear waste management requires institutional steadiness: sustained oversight, technical competence, organizational memory and public confidence accumulated gradually over decades. A nuclear waste facility is, after all, a composite infrastructure: at once material, institutional, epistemic, civilizational and civic. It depends on durable alignments of financial backing, public trust, technical competence and political will. 

Nevertheless, in 2025, Department of Government Efficiency reforms made it even more difficult to govern nuclear waste. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board — established to provide independent technical oversight for Energy Department waste programs — was left incapacitated, with all but one member removed. Executive branch pressure on the NRC unsettled perceptions of regulatory independence, as senior figures including a commissioner were dismissed.

These developments result from clear institutional design flaws. U.S. nuclear waste programs, operating under dense architectures of statutory constraint and budgetary dependence, are subject to recurrent partisan policy resets. This renders them ill-equipped to extend any given vision of intergenerational care beyond a single electoral cycle, raising the question of whether the system could be restructured to better insulate it from political turbulence.

For more than 15 years, experts have advocated for the establishment of a mission-specific U.S. nuclear waste organization. This entity would have a narrower mandate, protected funding streams and implementation functions detached from electoral turnover. It would coordinate siting, licensing, transportation and disposal while fulfilling commitments to states, tribal nations and host communities. 

Some analysts envision this as a new Energy Department office detached from the Office of Nuclear Energy. Others recommend a congressionally chartered federal corporation loosely modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority: a single-purpose waste policy implementer with its own board, dedicated funding and broad latitude to negotiate siting agreements and manage storage, transport and disposal. Still others seek a federally chartered corporation led by reactor owners and enacted as a nonprofit or public-benefit company.

In each scenario, the underlying logic remains consistent: Nuclear waste stewardship must be disentangled from the capricious tempos of American political culture and the waxing and waning of enthusiasm for nuclear energy. 

The establishment of a more independent, nonpartisan, lower-key nuclear waste management entity would better align the U.S. with successful frameworks abroad. Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization has advanced a repository initiative in partnership with Indigenous nations and a potential host community in Ignace, Ontario, after a 14-year consent-based siting process. The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company has broken ground in the village of Forsmark, where excavation and preparatory work for a repository is underway. Posiva, a company in Finland, stands on the cusp of operating the world’s first spent fuel repository, pending regulatory approval. These examples underscore how effective long-range federal promises depend not on perpetual reinvention, but on steady follow-through. 

Finland’s progress merits special attention. Its repository siting program succeeded through a voluntary, stepwise process that has advanced steadily since the 1980s, with opt-out points preserved for communities at each stage. The host municipality of Eurajoki was granted a legally binding veto right — a form of civic power-sharing that fostered community trust. Credibility was sustained through long-term, face-to-face engagement. Finland’s nuclear regulatory authority, STUK, built relationships with municipal councils, regional publics and industry representatives. Consent was stabilized through fiscal integration. Within a decade of the repository site being selected, nuclear facilities accounted for roughly 90% of Eurajoki’s real-estate tax revenue and approximately one-third of its total tax revenue. 

Simply put: Finland’s governance architectures align more harmoniously with the multimillennial scope of the radioactive half-life and the centurial scope of operating a geological repository. As a result, Onkalo, the repository, is perceived by the public as a pragmatic engineering undertaking — an almost banal administrative task — conducted with relatively little controversy. This posture is not easily sustained in an American political culture defined by speed, reversibility, litigiousness and suspicion of final answers. 

In the U.S., nuclear waste has been stewarded by institutions fixated on short-term agenda cycles — new programs, new breakthroughs, new visions, new technologies, new political superheroes — as long-term consequences pile up. The outcome has been a governance regime in which accountability diffuses and responsibility for long-term safety becomes difficult to pin down. 

Read in this light, Yucca Mountain’s legal gridlock, and the 16-year saga of policy pivots that followed its abandonment, become an artifact of a political culture that excels at inaugurations but is unpracticed in continuity — where ambition abounds, but follow-through is elusive.

Yucca Mountain Redux

There is little reason to believe Yucca Mountain will — or should — be revived as a spent nuclear fuel disposal facility. Doing so would reignite a fraught legacy of political acrimony, legal dispute, scientific contestation and institutional mistrust. However, reviving Yucca Mountain as a diagnostic artifact can help gauge American democracy’s ability to uphold long-term promises.

“A community asked to host a nuclear waste facility for decades or centuries must be able to trust that the federal promises made today will still hold tomorrow.”

America’s nuclear waste governance regime is shot through with misalignments. With the Nuclear Waste Policy Act still cuffed to the Yucca Mountain site, the Energy Department is barred from building repositories or storage facilities elsewhere. With court-ordered liabilities still channeling taxpayer dollars to utilities, the nuclear industry has less incentive to see a repository built. With America’s spent fuel program still based in the Office of Nuclear Energy, efforts to contain nuclear waste for millennia remain a side act to ambitions to roll out advanced reactors across decades. 

Meanwhile, successive administrations inherit the same temptation: to reopen the file, to rename the mission, to stage a fresh beginning. Such are the workings of a polity able to finance excavation, draft statutes and complete safety assessments, yet unable to fulfill a commitment on behalf of future generations. 

In 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced the Nuclear Waste Administration Act, which proposed moving America’s nuclear waste program to a mission-specific nuclear waste management entity more consistent with those of Canada, Finland and Sweden. Its passage would have marked a symbolic break from Yucca Mountain’s legacy of decide-announce-defend siting and not-in-my-backyard resistance. The reform could have seeded a steadier, sturdier institutional formation better aligned with the temporal rhythms of geology, law, engineering, community consent and budgetary allocation. 

However, like so much else in the universe of nuclear waste policy, the Act came and went. It never advanced beyond committee referral and expired with the end of the 118th Congress in January 2025.

Absent a decisive institutional break, Yucca Mountain will continue to haunt U.S. nuclear waste progress — the ghost of a grand plan the government cannot execute, yet appears unwilling to fully abandon.

Suspended in procedural time, Yucca Mountain is finished enough to be visited, inspected, photographed, debated and narrated in civil society. But it remains unfinished in the ways that ultimately matter. Yucca underscores how civic trust and institutional continuity are infrastructures no less material to nuclear responsibility than tunnels, rail lines, casks, drip shields or the Yucca Mucker.

The failure to build a governance regime reflecting this has rendered nuclear waste an unfinished sentence in American democracy. In this regard, Yucca Mountain becomes cautionary not just for the future of nuclear waste, but for any climate, energy or technological megaproject that depends on long-term promises from the federal government. 

In the Nevada underground, civilization’s longest promise remains unkept. The rock did not fail us. The polity did.