Nuclear vitality is getting one other look.
With rising vitality demand — pushed partially by AI-related information facilities — the United States is evaluating funding in nuclear energy. It’s the biggest supply of zero-carbon-emissions energy within the U.S., offering about 20% of the nation’s whole electrical energy.
In 2024, the Department of Energy introduced a objective to triple U.S. nuclear vitality output — a objective that President Trump elevated to quadruple in a 2025 government order.
Unfortunately, nuclear vitality has one obtrusive downside: radioactive waste.
Some nuclear waste will stay hazardous for tens of 1000’s of years, but the search for a safe, everlasting storage resolution has stalled for many years.
Despite a 1987 regulation naming Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the only U.S. location for spent nuclear materials, many years of political maneuvering, authorized challenges and native opposition have left the location empty. Construction had scarcely begun on the location when Congress eradicated its funding altogether in 2010.
Which begs the query: What would it not take for a neighborhood elsewhere to comply with host such a facility?
An interdisciplinary workforce of researchers, students and writers at Arizona State University want to reply that very radioactive query. They are empowering communities in efforts to resolve the nation’s nuclear waste downside by constructive and speculative approaches to exploring what it means to dwell close to such websites.
Inviting extra voices to form a long-term resolution
The long-stalled Yucca Mountain challenge has left over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste saved scattered throughout the U.S. at 100 websites in 39 states.
This has price the U.S. as much as $40 billion in funds to states and utilities as a result of the federal government is in violation of its personal regulation, after promising nuclear waste can be relocated by 1989.
“Now you have communities that have decommissioned nuclear reactors in their backyards,” said Associate Professor Jen Richter, who is jointly appointed in ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Social Transformation.
“They’re sitting on nuclear waste and they never agreed to that. They gave up their land, they worked for those plants, they produced the energy we needed as a nation, but they were never signing up to be permanent repositories for nuclear waste.”
Richter, who research nuclear vitality and waste coverage, says we want long-term nuclear waste repositories as a result of we hold producing nuclear waste however haven’t any long-term technique for managing it. Now there’s renewed curiosity on this matter and a rising demand to find these nuclear waste websites.
Backed by the Department of Energy, Richter and her colleagues, Mahmud Farooque and Nicholas Weller, are exploring how the federal authorities can method communities as companions find solutions to retailer nuclear waste long run.
Farooque is a scientific professor and affiliate director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes with a robust background in participatory expertise evaluation, a software for integrating new voices into science coverage discussions. Weller is an assistant analysis professor within the Center for Innovation in Informal STEM Learning.
Beginning in 2024, the workforce engaged communities throughout Arizona to get enter into find out how to design an progressive, consent-based method that the federal government may use to web site future nuclear waste amenities. This method ensures that communities get the ultimate say over whether or not or not a facility can be situated close by and the way it will match into the neighborhood.
To higher perceive what would matter to communities in such negotiations, Weller is facilitating neighborhood boards that ask individuals easy questions which can be usually ignored, like, “What do you love about your community?” and “What makes it special and unique?”
The workforce selected Arizona very deliberately.
“Arizona is one of the only states in the American West that actually has a nuclear power plant,” Richter mentioned.
It additionally homes the waste that plant has generated, which stays on web site till the U.S. builds a everlasting repository.
“So when you’re thinking about a state that has an obligation about nuclear waste, at the time we started this, Arizona had the largest nuclear power plant in the United States at Palo Verde,” Richter mentioned.
But it was additionally an vital a part of the selection that Arizona shouldn’t be within the operating to host a everlasting nuclear waste disposal facility. This helped the workforce keep away from misperceptions about their goal. The challenge was a check mattress to construct the capability to make tough selections — to not truly make these selections or decide what it will take for the general public to simply accept a nuclear waste facility of their neighborhood.
Six community workshops had been held in May and June 2025 in Yuma, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Parker, Sahuarita and Tempe.
Weller mentioned the findings from these workshops challenged assumptions inside the nuclear waste business, which regularly views monetary incentives as the highest motivator to accommodate a nuclear storage disposal facility. Instead, the information revealed that monetary incentives or financial progress alternatives had been a a lot decrease precedence than issues about long-term environmental and well being impacts.
Transparency and autonomy additionally emerged as key priorities. While neighborhood members need elected state, tribal, municipal and regional leaders concerned, they don’t want them making selections for the neighborhood.
Imagining radioactive futures
Fifty years sooner or later, concrete nuclear waste casks crack within the harsh Arizona solar. In this science fiction story, a Department of Energy inspector is torn between loyalty to his establishment and love for an artist-activist protesting the federal government negligence.
An artwork exhibition within the yr 2105 unspools the story of shifting nuclear waste to a nuclear storage web site towards the backdrop of a fractured America by scattered textual content messages, emails and transcripts.
An essay examines the renewed international curiosity in nuclear vitality — pushed by local weather change and rising vitality calls for from information facilities and different AI applied sciences — whereas arguing that far much less consideration is paid to the social and moral challenges of managing nuclear waste.
These are only a few of the entries comprising “Our Radioactive Neighbors.”
Published in January 2026 by the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Center for Energy and Society, the ebook explores the impacts of long-term nuclear waste storage by speculative fiction and essays.
The assortment was spearheaded by Clark Miller, the director of the Center for Energy and Society, and co-edited by Ruth Wylie and Joey Eschrich, researchers on the Center for Science and the Imagination.
When Miller heard Farooque and his workforce had been making use of for a grant to do public engagement round nuclear waste, he thought, “Wouldn’t it be valuable to have a book of speculative fiction stories to complement the public engagement — so that communities could better explore what their future might look under different scenarios?”
In Andrew Dana Hudson’s “Pursuant to the Agreement,” the U.S. experiences a multi-decade “great fracture,” leading to numerous states seceding. The story explores how insurance policies and establishments can stay efficient over the various many years required to handle nuclear waste, whilst political management and priorities change.
Hudson is a third-year Master of Fine Arts graduate scholar within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He’s additionally a sustainability researcher and the creator of a forthcoming novel, “ABSENCE,” to be printed in May 2026.
Hudson mentioned “Our Radioactive Neighbors” shines a brand new, imaginative mild on a solvable sustainability situation that has turn out to be an intractable social and political downside. He believes how we handle our nuclear waste is a matter of doing proper by communities and future generations.
He mentioned ASU has cultivated a novel set of practices round making use of imaginative and speculative abilities to the world’s most urgent challenges.
“Our Radioactive Neighbors” pressured the workforce to consider people who find themselves simply encountering this matter for the primary time. While the contributors didn’t need to be a mouthpiece for the nuclear waste business, in addition they did not really feel it was applicable to inform tales that had been solely doom and gloom.
“Our hope is that this book can be a resource for communities, not that we have their future in our book, but that we spark their imagination about their own future and help them build their imaginative capabilities to make good long-term choices and take into account the needs of future generations,” Miller mentioned.
Miller mentioned the ebook, its tales, and the bigger challenge could not have occurred if ASU wasn’t radically interdisciplinary and keen to method issues otherwise.
“No one knows, yet, where the nation will look next as a place to put a long-term nuclear waste storage facility,” Miller mentioned, “but the communities living nearby need to be able to trust the process and be given the opportunity to imagine what the facility might mean for their future and their grandchildren’s future.”
The School for the Future of Innovation in Society is a unit of the Rob Walton College of Global Futures. The faculty, the Center for Innovation in Informal STEM Learning and the Center for Energy in Society are a part of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.