America’s Nuclear Revival Runs Into a $44.5B Waste Dilemma No One Wants to Tackle

Silicon Valley is embracing nuclear’s comeback — but there’s a glowing elephant in the room. President Trump’s executive orders aim to quadruple nuclear output over 25 years through traditional and next-gen small modular reactors (SMRs). Yet the Department of Energy still has no permanent disposal site, leaving taxpayers on the hook for up to $800M a year in utility damages — a bill that’s already reached $11.1B since 1998 and could soar to $44.5B.

• The US signed an $80B agreement with CamecoCCJ
  and Brookfield Asset ManagementBAM
  to expand nuclear infrastructure, with plans to potentially create a federal nuclear entity.
• Despite 95K metric tons of nuclear waste spread across 79 sites, Bill Gates downplayed the concern in 2023, noting nuclear power would only generate “a few rooms worth of total waste.”

Waste not, want not: Only two nuclear plants have been built in the US since 1990 — both ran $15B over budget and finished years late. Startups like OkloOKLO

and Deep Isolation are taking new routes, from reprocessing fuel to drilling deep vertical tunnels for waste. While Finland leads with the world’s first permanent disposal site, others like Sweden and Canada are close behind. Still, former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane called the fast-track timeline “neither realistic nor achievable,” though she opposes closing existing reactors.