As coal plants close, Colorado towns consider nuclear waste storage

HAYDEN, Colo — For several years now, nuclear power has been trying to make a comeback in the U.S.

The Biden administration liked nuclear’s low carbon footprint, and President Trump has cited nuclear as part of his plan to “unleash American energy.” That’s adding pressure to the decades-long effort to find a place to store the radioactive waste U.S. nuclear power plants produce.

One place under discussion is the sparsely populated northwest corner of Colorado.

Conversations are happening at places like The Wild Goose, a cozy coffee shop tucked inside an old grain elevator in the tiny town of Hayden, Colo. A coal-fired power plant towering over this community is closing soon, and people are urgently pondering Hayden’s future.

“The impacts are huge”

“There’s a lot of great minds working together to figure some of the impacts out, because the impacts are huge,” says Tammie Delaney.

Town officials say the power plant has been providing more than half the property tax revenue to run Hayden’s schools, fire department and other essential services.

She and her husband, Patrick, own this gathering spot, and they’re trying to help their town transition. They recently converted old grain warehouses into short term rentals and a hip wine bar. But last fall, the Delaneys started hearing about a much bigger idea: replacing the dying coal industry with nuclear energy.

Patrick is intrigued.

“There’s a lot of great things about nuclear power,” he says. ” I mean, a pellet the size of your thumbnail has the same energy content as 1,000 pounds of coal, that’s amazing.”

But they also have concerns.

To help facilitate the push for nuclear energy, a regional energy development initiative in northwest Colorado is shopping around the idea of hosting a temporary, consolidated storage site for the radioactive spent fuel produced by the nation’s nuclear power plants.

Large concrete and steel canisters of the spent fuel would be loaded on to specially built crash-resistant trucks and trains and brought to a warehouse far from people.

It wouldn’t be built in Hayden. The talks about the storage facility have been happening in a handful of neighboring counties to the west, bordering Utah. But the Delaneys fear regional impacts.

“Obviously, a lot of concerns with transporting nuclear waste by rail,” Patrick said.

A decades-long challenge

Right now, nuclear plants store their waste on site in 35 states. The federal government has been trying to find a single place for them to send it since 1970.

In 2021, Congress set aside money to identify places that might be open to building a temporary storage site until a permanent repository is secured.

The Northwest Colorado Energy Initiative, which is focused on finding a replacement for the region’s coal industry, responded. Last fall at a series of low-key meetings, it introduced the concept of storing spent fuel.

“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,” said Matt Solomon, the project manager for the NCEI.

A few months ago, the group won a federal grant to start local discussions about maybe siting an interim waste storage facility somewhere in the region.

“It’s not The Simpsons with bubbling green fluid,” Solomon says of the waste that would be sent to a temporary storage site. “It’s concrete casks with eraser tip pieces of metal that are cooling down.”

Other grantees include Oak Ridge, Tennessee, eastern Kentucky and Carlsbad, New Mexico.

It’s early in the process, and Solomon’s talks are just getting started in Colorado. But the waste storage idea is getting mixed reactions deep in the state’s coal country.

Craig, which is home to about 9,000 people and less than 20 miles west of Hayden, is also losing a nearby coal-fired power plant. Resident Sasha Nelson says she understands why the talks are happening.

It’s Nelson’s job to help northwest Colorado transition away from coal. She calls the talks about potential nuclear development “critical” to assess options for the future. But she worries about the waste component.

How dangerous is it?

“It would break my heart, if, because of our remoteness, because of the space that we still have available, that that becomes a place where any project just ends, where we’re, you know, a waste disposal area,” she said.

Nuclear engineers have different views about how safe it is to temporarily store the radioactive spent fuel.

Anna Erickson, a professor of nuclear and radiological engineering in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, says the nation has a good safety record.

“The radiation around those casks is actually not that high,” she says. “Those casks are regularly inspected today by humans with those Geiger counters that you’ve seen or other instruments. But in the future, we’re looking to move to robotics inspection.”

Other experts have concerns. Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned scientists in Washington, D.C., worries the fuel canisters could leak radiation if they’re involved in severe crashes during transport, or targeted by terrorists.

“A deliberate attack is certainly one way where you could maximize the potential harm to the community from that facility,” he said.

In a 2012 report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office called spent nuclear fuel “one of the most hazardous materials created by humans.”

The U.S. Department of Energy is asking communities that want to keep talking about hosting a temporary waste site to say so by this fall. It hopes to open a facility by 2038.