By Oliver Hemmers
Category: Energy

Imagine every scrap of nuclear waste the United States has ever produced fitting neatly on a single football field, stacked just ten feet high. Now imagine the waste from coal, the fuel many Nevadans still trust to keep the lights on, burying an area the size of the entire Las Vegas Valley under twelve feet of toxic ash. One of these waste problems gets constant political attention. The other barely gets mentioned. That gap says a lot about how we think about energy, and it is time to close it.

Nuclear Energy Produces Far Less Waste Than Coal

Previously, we discussed two ways to generate energy: splitting atoms or burning them. To recap, splitting a uranium atom releases 50 million times as much energy as burning a carbon atom to CO2. Unlike burning carbon atoms, splitting uranium atoms does not produce CO2 or generate massive amounts of toxic ash, making it a significantly cleaner energy source. When generating the same energy output, coal also produces a dramatically larger volume of waste.

You could fit all the accumulated nuclear waste in the United States on a football field, stacked ten feet high. By contrast, toxic coal ash would cover the entire Las Vegas Valley, bounded to the west by the Spring Mountains, to the north by the Sheep Range, and to the east and south by the Muddy Mountains and Black Mountains, in a twelve foot layer.

Of course, nobody wants to bury the Las Vegas Valley under coal ash, but the current approach to handling the waste is not that much different. Existing coal ash waste already occupies more than one thousand massive, active landfills across the country, many of which cover hundreds of acres. Yet public policy often overlooks toxic coal ash, instead always asking, “What should we do with all that nuclear waste?”

Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than People Realize

Despite the common framing that nuclear waste contains radioactive elements, coal ash is considered “only” a heavy metal laden toxic waste. Contrary to this framing, coal ash contains up to four times as much radioactive material as existing nuclear waste. So why isn’t coal ash, a nuclear waste product, regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)? The answer is dilution. Dispersing radioactive toxic heavy metals across thousands of landfills shields the coal industry from strict regulatory oversight.

But when it comes to that football field filled with nuclear waste from decades of nuclear energy production, producers cannot resort to dilution. For a long time, policymakers believed that digging a hole in Yucca Mountain was the solution to disposing of nuclear waste (or half of it, since Yucca Mountain was designated to hold only half of the nation’s nuclear waste). But that is a terrible approach that buries a treasure and stifles innovation and growth.

Why “Nuclear Waste” Is Really Slightly Used Fuel

Conventional nuclear reactors extract only 3% of the energy from nuclear fuel, leaving a large amount of unspent fuel. Therefore, the term “Slightly Used Nuclear Fuel” (SUNF) is a more accurate description of the material.

By design, current nuclear power plants cannot extract more energy. Their technology dates to the 1960s and 1970s and traces to the first Navy reactors implemented by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in 1948. The first commercial nuclear reactor, which went operational in 1957, was based on the original Navy light water design, never intended to maximize energy extraction. The construction of more commercial reactors followed but all used the same technology, extracting only a fraction of the energy contained in nuclear fuel.

Decades of Research Point to a Better Reactor Design

Back in the 1960s, this was already a well known shortcoming of producing electricity with commercial nuclear reactors. A few years after the first commercial reactors began operating, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Nobel Laureate Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, sent a report about the status of nuclear energy in the U.S. to President John F. Kennedy on November 19, 1962. While the transmittal letter itself used formal executive summary phrasing, Seaborg used the following passionate wording in subsequent statements in late 1962 and early 1963 to summarize the report’s conclusions:

“This restudy made it apparent that, for the long term benefit of the country, and indeed of the whole world, it was high time we placed more emphasis on the longer range and more difficult problem of breeder reactors, which can make use of nearly all of our uranium and thorium reserves, instead of the less than one percent.”

This recommendation marked the start of research into new designs and decades of successful reactor test runs with reactors capable of extracting up to 25 times the energy left behind by existing nuclear reactors. In the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, these efforts slowed and eventually stopped, even though the accident did not kill or injure anyone. The media’s fear campaigns did far more harm and psychological damage to the population than the incident itself.

Other Countries Are Already Recycling Nuclear Fuel

Nowadays, several U.S. companies and some international competitors are developing reactor designs based on the results of these early efforts to recycle the existing SUNF stockpile, drawing on decades of research and successful reactor operations. Countries such as Russia, China, and India operate these reactors, and Dual Fluid Energy is building one in Rwanda.

The Massive Economic Opportunity in America’s Existing Fuel Supply

The U.S. could use domestic companies to recycle SUNF, producing large amounts of energy from an almost unlimited domestic fuel supply. Even if the entire U.S. were powered by SUNF, the available stockpile would last for several centuries. No additional uranium mining or enrichment would be required to sustain the demand.

The value of electricity that could be produced from SUNF is estimated at $100 trillion (about $310,000 per person in the U.S.). The energy abundance this innovation brings is not just for private citizens but also for enormous power hungry industries like AI data centers. At that point, electricity prices could drop to pennies per kilowatt hour for ratepayers.

The Bottom Line on Nuclear Waste and America’s Energy Future

In summary, burning coal to produce electricity generates waste that is 200,000 times more voluminous than nuclear energy’s so called waste. It contains up to four times the uranium and thorium of all existing nuclear waste in the U.S., along with toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, cadmium, and chromium. When rainwater or groundwater infiltrates unlined coal ash basins, the resulting alkaline or acidic water dissolves these metals, creating toxic plumes that can contaminate local drinking water and nearby water bodies.

While electricity production is mainly vilified for its CO2 emissions rather than toxic waste, critics of nuclear energy focus on the comparatively tiny amounts of nuclear waste and don’t understand that SUNF is essentially leftover fuel for a new generation of nuclear reactors that is very different from the existing fleet. SUNF is the feedstock for fast reactor recycling, which can extract up to 25 times more energy than the reactors that created it and can produce $100 trillion worth of additional electricity for the entire U.S. for several centuries. This is not only the cleanest form of electric power production but also an essential part of national security.

Interesting Fact: By extracting fissionable nuclear materials from coal ash currently stored in landfills and using them to generate power through fast reactor recycling, we could produce enough electricity to power the entire U.S. for over 1,000 years at current consumption levels.

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