ASU helps communities envision solutions for nuclear waste

Nuclear energy is getting another look.

With rising energy demand — driven in part by AI-related data centers — the United States is evaluating investment in nuclear power. It’s the largest source of zero-carbon-emissions power in the U.S., providing about 20% of the nation’s total electricity. 

In 2024, the Department of Energy announced a goal to triple U.S. nuclear energy output — a goal that President Trump increased to quadruple in a 2025 executive order.

Unfortunately, nuclear energy has one glaring problem: radioactive waste. 

Some nuclear waste will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years, yet the search for a secure, permanent storage solution has stalled for decades.

Despite a 1987 law naming Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the sole U.S. location for spent nuclear material, decades of political maneuvering, legal challenges and local opposition have left the site empty. Construction had scarcely begun on the site when Congress eliminated its funding altogether in 2010.

Which raises the question: What would it take for a community somewhere else to agree to host such a facility?

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, scholars and writers at Arizona State University are looking to answer that very radioactive question. They are empowering communities in efforts to solve the nation’s nuclear waste problem through constructive and speculative approaches to exploring what it means to live near such sites.

The long-stalled Yucca Mountain project has left over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste stored scattered across the U.S. at 100 sites in 39 states.

This has cost the U.S. up to $40 billion in payments to states and utilities because the government is in violation of its own law, after promising nuclear waste would 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 studies nuclear energy and waste policy, says we need long-term nuclear waste repositories because we keep producing nuclear waste but have no long-term strategy for managing it. Now there is renewed interest in this topic and a rising demand to locate these nuclear waste sites.

Backed by the Department of Energy, Richter and her colleagues, Mahmud Farooque and Nicholas Weller, are exploring how the federal government can approach communities as partners in finding solutions to store nuclear waste long term.

Farooque is a clinical professor and associate director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes with a strong background in participatory technology assessment, a tool for integrating new voices into science policy discussions. Weller is an assistant research professor in the Center for Innovation in Informal STEM Learning.

Beginning in 2024, the team engaged communities across Arizona to get input into how to design an innovative, consent-based approach that the government could use to site future nuclear waste facilities. This approach ensures that communities get the final say over whether or not a facility would be located nearby and how it would fit into the community.

To better understand what would matter to communities in such negotiations, Weller is facilitating community forums that ask people simple questions that are often overlooked, like, “What do you love about your community?” and “What makes it special and unique?”

The team chose Arizona very intentionally.

“Arizona is one of the only states in the American West that actually has a nuclear power plant,” Richter said. 

It also houses the waste that plant has generated, which remains on site until the U.S. builds a permanent 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 said.

But it was also an important part of the choice that Arizona is not in the running to host a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility. This helped the team avoid misperceptions about their purpose. The project was a test bed to build the capacity to make difficult decisions — not to actually make those decisions or determine what it would take for the public to accept a nuclear waste facility in their community.

Six community workshops were held in May and June 2025 in Yuma, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Parker, Sahuarita and Tempe.

Weller said the findings from these workshops challenged assumptions within the nuclear waste industry, which often views financial incentives as the top motivator to house a nuclear storage disposal facility. Instead, the data revealed that financial incentives or economic growth opportunities were a much lower priority than concerns about long-term environmental and health impacts.

Transparency and autonomy also emerged as key priorities. While community members want elected state, tribal, municipal and regional leaders involved, they do not want them making decisions for the community. 

Fifty years in the future, concrete nuclear waste casks crack in the harsh Arizona sun. In this science fiction story, a Department of Energy inspector is torn between loyalty to his institution and love for an artist-activist protesting the government negligence.

An art exhibition in the year 2105 unspools the story of moving nuclear waste to a nuclear storage site against the backdrop of a fractured America through scattered text messages, emails and transcripts.

An essay examines the renewed global interest in nuclear energy — driven by climate change and rising energy demands from data centers and other AI technologies — while arguing that far less attention is paid to the social and ethical challenges of managing nuclear waste.

These are just a few of the entries making up "Our Radioactive Neighbors." 

Published in January 2026 by the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Center for Energy and Society, the book explores the impacts of long-term nuclear waste storage through speculative fiction and essays.

The collection was spearheaded by Clark Miller, the director of the Center for Energy and Society, and co-edited by Ruth Wylie and Joey Eschrich, researchers at the Center for Science and the Imagination.

When Miller heard Farooque and his team were applying for a grant to do public engagement around 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,” resulting in various states seceding. The story explores how policies and institutions can remain effective over the many decades required to manage nuclear waste, even as political leadership and priorities change. 

Hudson is a third-year Master of Fine Arts graduate student in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He’s also a sustainability researcher and the author of a forthcoming novel, “ABSENCE,” to be published in May 2026.

Hudson said “Our Radioactive Neighbors” shines a new, imaginative light on a solvable sustainability issue that has become an intractable social and political problem. He believes how we manage our nuclear waste is a matter of doing right by communities and future generations. 

He said ASU has cultivated a unique set of practices around applying imaginative and speculative skills to the world’s most pressing challenges.

“Our Radioactive Neighbors” forced the team to think about people who are just encountering this topic for the first time. While the contributors didn’t want to be a mouthpiece for the nuclear waste industry, they also didn't feel it was appropriate to tell stories that were only 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 said.

Miller said the book, its stories, and the larger project couldn't have happened if ASU wasn’t radically interdisciplinary and willing to approach things differently.

“No one knows, yet, where the nation will look next as a place to put a long-term nuclear waste storage facility,” Miller said, “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 college, the Center for Innovation in Informal STEM Learning and the Center for Energy in Society are part of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.