Many states have resisted nuclear waste storage plans. Northwestern Colorado is quietly opening the door. ...Middle East

Highly radioactive waste is piling up at nuclear power plants around the United States. And the nation has been trying, and failing, since the early 1980s to find a safer place to store this fuel once it’s done powering the reactors.

After facing decades of resistance, the federal government is slowly starting a new process to identify a storage site after its plans to permanently store all the waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain fell apart. That proposal was stalled by strong public opposition and environmental and safety concerns.

Many other Western states have slammed the door on efforts to store this waste anywhere near their residents.

Enter the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado. The organization is a small economic development group in far northwestern Colorado, representing six counties bordering Utah, and is quietly cracking the door open to becoming a new home for the nation’s nuclear waste.

The group’s leaders are floating financial incentives, labeling resistance in neighboring states as NIMBYism, touting the safety record of existing waste storage facilities and pointing to Colorado’s reputation for taking on high-risk energy jobs like mining.

The AGNC has also accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the federal government to help gauge city and county officials about building a new repository somewhere in the rural part of the state.

Last fall, the group organized little-noticed hearings at sleepy town council meetings to introduce the idea of becoming a nuclear waste repository. Some of it’s leaders have also met privately with state lawmakers to talk about it.

The AGNC’s goal: Trying to normalize the idea of importing nuclear waste and break down a “bad rap.”

“It’s not bubbling green fluid like the Simpsons,” program director Matt Solomon told county commissioners in Rio Blanco County at a public meeting in Rangely in September. Nuclear waste is “in concrete casks with eraser tip pieces of metal that are cooling down. So it’s contained in a park that looks like a concrete industrial park.”

Solomon said building a storage facility for nuclear waste could help the region replace hundreds of lost high-paying jobs due to the closure of the area’s coal mines and power plants.

Solomon isn’t a nuclear engineer, but he is a former politician and the leader of the Northwest Colorado Energy Initiative, a group looking for an energy alternative to coal.

Landing a nuclear waste facility would bring “its own entity of staffing and workforce and engineers, welders, construction people,” he said.

Only two people were in the audience at this particular gathering. But these forums could have enormous implications and not just for people living in northwestern Colorado.

The United States has never built a consolidated storage facility for its spent nuclear fuel. But by scouring government documents and video recordings and talking to nuclear engineers, a rough picture emerges.

Heavily fortified trains and trucks would transport this waste along Colorado’s highways and rail lines. Armed guards would follow it the entire way and police would have to be notified along the route. The concrete casks containing the radioactive waste would end in a facility far away from people that looks something like a warehouse.

Radiation levels would either be checked occasionally by humans with Geiger counters, or eventually robotic sensors.

And there would be a roughly 2-square-mile exclusion zone around the facility for health and safety reasons.

Starting quietly

Solomon is purposefully trying to avoid drawing lots of public attention to his early conversations about nuclear waste storage.

At a follow up meeting with the Rio Blanco commissioners in November, he explained why.

“I want to be cautious in keeping this a focused meeting, not a public hearing, because we’re not at the public hearing part yet,” he said.

He pointed to environmental activism and public opposition against the idea of creating a nuclear power plant in Pueblo as a reason to start without public hearings.

“I want us to stay ahead of that so that we can have data driven, fact-based discussions and remove the emotional outcry from the conversation,” he said.

There was no major public proclamation from the AGNC that northwestern Colorado was going to entertain the idea of importing spent nuclear fuel.

This all started quietly, and as a bit of a riddle.

In July, a nuclear industry news website published an announcement riddled with acronyms that the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado was one of three groups in the nation set to receive up to $150,000 in grant funds from a group called the Energy Communities Alliance.

said AGNC would use the grant to “develop education, knowledge exchange, and mutual learning and utilize surveys, focus groups, and interviews to engage community members in discussions about the potential siting of an interim storage facility.”

The announcement didn’t mention this grant money originated from the U.S. Department of Energy, and that it’s part of a broader $26 million investment from the federal government to launch education campaigns about the idea of storing nuclear waste and eventually find a host willing to take it.

The government is labeling this process “consent-based siting,” and it’s expected to formally ask which communities are interested in hosting a nuclear waste facility as early as next fall.

A nuclear future for Colorado?

In northwestern Colorado, Solomon and AGNC’s leaders stress that their talks about importing nuclear waste are preliminary, conceptual and non-binding. But they’re also speaking favorably about the idea of building a storage facility somewhere in rural Colorado.

In October, in between his meetings with elected officials, Solomon went on a podcast called Fire2Fission and said that nuclear waste has wrongfully earned a bad reputation. He said a lack of public education is responsible for the opposition to taking it in.

“Let’s be a little more accurate in how we communicate these things so that we can work on correcting the course of this bad rap,” he said. “Let’s communicate better. Let’s communicate more accurately.”

Solomon said that includes telling the public that the places where nuclear waste is currently being stored, including one near Crystal River, Florida, have been hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters without suffering any radiation leaks. 

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Solomon said the idea of potentially storing nuclear waste in Colorado was also sparked by surveys indicating strong support for nuclear energy in the region.

He tells KUNC that helping to solve the nation’s nuclear waste storage problem could eventually land Colorado an entire industry of nuclear power and clean energy.

With the nation vowing to triple its nuclear power production by 2050, the stakes are high.

“There’s an opportunity to set up a whole new energy-related industry in this region of our state, and secure some of the jobs and some of the homes and the families in this area,” he said.

Lots of questions

Solomon’s first meetings with town councils and county commissioners from Grand Junction to Meeker have sparked a flurry of questions and some concerns.

“What percentage of that radiation is around the areas of the people, or, like the people or environment around the storage facilities?” Chrissy Neilsen, the assistant to the Rio Blanco Board of County Commissioners, asked Solomon.

Solomon is not a nuclear engineer, so he takes the questions and writes them in a notebook, promising to get answers from the scientists and the Department of Energy.

Neilsen said, “We don’t want to put something where we’re going to be radiating anything and everything around.”

Tiffany Dickenson, the executive director of the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado, said nuclear energy is becoming more popular in northwestern Colorado.

She called nuclear waste storage “safe” and said her region might be more willing to host it because it is still an area of energy pioneers.

“We do oil and gas already, and we understand the risks, and yet our people do that,” she said. “It is our children that, you know, go and find those jobs.”

She also pointed to the abundance of public lands in northwestern Colorado as another reason she doesn’t want to close the door on nuclear waste storage.

“It’s definitely not like we’re all on top of each other, and that there’s this real fear that you would have nuclear waste under your house or something like that,” she said.

Solomon and Dickenson also have some support at the statehouse.

State Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat from Dillon, is supportive of looking into the idea of constructing a nuclear waste facility in his region.

“I appreciate and understand the concerns about health and safety, but it does seem that in today’s modern world, here in 2024-2025, that there are ways to very easily secure this waste and ensure that community safety is protected,” he said.

Solomon and the AGNC are planning to ramp up their public outreach on the idea of nuclear waste storage in the spring.

In a report Solomon filed last fall for the Department of Energy, he said there was “no notable fear or hesitation at the local level” about participating in the government’s search for a waste storage facility. He also quoted an unnamed town council member as saying they were “all in.”

For the next installment of Toxic Waste or Economic Fuel? we ask northwestern Colorado residents living in cities transitioning away from coal about what they think of the prospect of importing nuclear waste to their region.

This story was reported for KUNC and was first published on Jan. 14, 2024.

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