US Senate Weighs $50 Billion Nuclear Energy Integrated Campus Plan, Aiming to Link Advanced Reactors, Waste Recycling, and AI Computing Centers

en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works held a hearing on Wednesday to deliberate a federal plan totaling $50 billion. The plan proposes funding the construction of three regional future "Nuclear innovation campuses," attracting heavy manufacturing and computing centers through abundant zero-carbon energy supply, while also building radioactive waste storage and disposal facilities within the campuses in a coordinated manner.

At the committee hearing, Lake Barrett, chairman of the American Nuclear Society Nuclear Waste Policy Task Force, urged Congress to amend the decades-old Nuclear Waste Policy Act to adapt to the new stage of private capital entering spent fuel reprocessing. Barrett pointed out that due to long-term stagnation at the federal level, taxpayers and electricity ratepayers currently bear approximately $800 million in fiscal costs each year merely for the temporary storage of spent fuel rods, and this accumulating debt is turning the nation's strategic energy resources, which could otherwise be recycled, into a heavy fiscal burden.

The plan originates from the "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus (NLIC)" initiative proposed by the US Department of Energy (DOE) in July, which plans to establish three regional hubs, each integrating data centers, advanced reactors, and commercial-scale nuclear fuel recycling facilities. Currently, in addition to Tennessee, Louisiana, Utah, Oklahoma, and Idaho, which previously signed memoranda of cooperation, the Department of Energy officially added West Virginia in September as a candidate hub host site.

Unlike the previous model of handling nuclear materials in a dispersed manner, the plan seeks to use a "regional coordinated bundling" model to guide states to accept waste storage as a precondition in exchange for the arrival of high-load manufacturing enterprises and advanced nuclear power plants. The Department of Energy estimates that each hub can generate $10 billion in long-term local tax revenue and create 25,000 jobs. Shelley Moore Capito, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, said it is necessary to break the policy deadlock caused over the past forty years by the shelving of the Yucca Mountain permanent geological repository project in Nevada, advance the modernization of the outdated nuclear waste legislative framework, and avoid it constraining the next stage of domestic advanced manufacturing and national energy security planning.