Spent nuclear fuel has nowhere to go — 12.2 billion dollars in damages paid and not one ton accepted

What is happening?

The United States has no permanent repository and no operating consolidated storage site for commercial used nuclear fuel. About 95,000 metric tons of it, held in some 330,000 fuel assemblies, sat at 73 sites at the end of 2024, and the pile grows by roughly 2,000 metric tons a year. Under more than 69 Standard Contracts signed after the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the Department of Energy agreed to begin taking that fuel by January 31, 1998 — and because no facility exists to receive it, acceptance has never begun.

The bill for that is settled law, not a forecast. As of 2025-09-30 the Treasury Judgment Fund had paid 12.2 billion dollars in partial-breach damages, and DOE puts the remaining liability at 38.6 to 44.3 billion dollars on top of that.

Whose problem is this?

The agency that owes the obligation cannot build the thing that would discharge it, and the body that can grant it that power is not the body being sued.

Where does this problem end?

The boundary matters because the missing thing here is not a technology and not a budget line.

What is the state now, and what should it be?

Now

What it should be. Unlike most problems in this corpus, the target here is not a percentage anyone has to argue about. It is a date, and it is written into more than 69 signed contracts: disposal was to begin on January 31, 1998. That date is 28 years past and the quantity accepted is still zero.

How big is it?

The thing that gets measured here is the fuel, not the people. About 95,000 metric tons of commercial used fuel, held in some 330,000 assemblies, sat at 73 sites at the end of 2024, and the inventory grows by roughly 2,000 metric tons a year. A 2026 policy note citing DOE puts it at over 95,000 metric tons across 79 sites in more than 30 states, and projects roughly 180,000 metric tons by the time the reactors now running reach the end of their lives.

Twenty of those sites no longer have an operating reactor. At those places the fuel is the only remaining reason the site is still a licensed site with a guard force.

Fills with researchthe population living near the storage sites was not counted. None of the sources opened here publishes resident counts by site, and splitting a national figure among states by population share would be proportional allocation, which this file does not do. The accompanying population file is therefore marked not-derivable rather than estimated.

Under what conditions does it arise?

1. The obligation and the authority sit in different hands. DOE owes the obligation under the contracts. Congress holds the power to authorize a place to put the fuel, and DOE has said plainly that construction and operation of a federal consolidated interim storage facility require the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to be amended first. 2. The bill does not land on the agency that incurs it. Damages are paid from the Judgment Fund, a permanent indefinite appropriation at Treasury, and not from the budget of the Department of Energy. The agency that misses the date is not the agency whose accounts get smaller when the date is missed. 3. Storage works well enough. Dry casks keep the fuel safe where it sits, so the failure never surfaces as an outage or an accident. It surfaces as an accumulating pile and an accumulating invoice, and neither of those has a moment at which something stops. 4. Host jurisdictions can refuse, and two of them have moved to write the refusal into law. New Mexico enacted a consent requirement in 2023, and in 2025 the Texas legislature sent the governor a bill restating that waste may be stored only where a reactor operates.

The fuel keeps accumulating whether or not anyone decides anything, and nothing in that accumulation forces a decision.

What has been tried?

The attempts fall into two families, one that looks for a place and one that looks for permission, and after 39 years neither family has finished.

What was found?

Why is it still unsolved?

Institutional gap — the party that owes the obligation cannot lawfully build the thing that would discharge it, and the party that can grant that power has not granted it in 28 years of default.

The shape of this is unusual and worth stating carefully. This is not an underfunded program: the Nuclear Waste Fund held 51,428 million dollars in investments on 2025-09-30, while the yearly appropriation for integrated waste management ran at 55 million. It is not an unsolved engineering question either, since the fuel is already sitting in dry casks and nothing in the sources opened here names a technical barrier. What is missing is legal permission and a consenting place, and neither of those is something the defendant can buy.

The second half of that pair showed itself in 2025 in a way that is hard to misread. The licensing route ran all the way to the Supreme Court and won on 2025-06-18, on procedural rules about who was entitled to sue rather than on the substantive question of licensing authority. Four months later the New Mexico developer canceled anyway, because the state had legislated a consent requirement in 2023, and the Texas developer said it would not proceed without the consent of a state whose legislature had just restated the opposite position. A license turned out not to be a place.

Every year of delay is billed to a fund that never appears in the budget of the department responsible for the delay. That is why the meter can run at roughly 3 million dollars a day without anything in the system reacting to it.

What observation would mean it is solved?

Candidates — (a) DOE physically accepts the first canister of commercial used fuel under a Standard Contract (b) the annual Judgment Fund payment for spent fuel falls and keeps falling (c) Congress amends the Act to authorize construction and operation of consolidated storage, or a repository license is issued.

(b) is the trap. Settlement payments are timed by litigation schedules, so the annual figure can fall in a year when nothing physical happens, and it can fall permanently if the amended Standard Contract simply narrows who is owed. (c) is authority, not a site — 2025 showed that a federal license is not the same thing as a place that will take the fuel. (a) is the only physical event, but read alone it can also mark a smaller victory than it looks: fuel moved to interim storage is fuel that has changed address, and if no repository follows, a disposal problem has been converted into a storage problem with a new host community attached.

What is it connected to?

Fills with researchplausible links to defense high-level waste cleanup, to reactor license extensions to 80 years, to the reprocessing question raised by the 2026 campus initiative, and to repository siting abroad. Relation type and evidence grade were not established in this round.

What these sources do not say

• A site-by-site list with tonnage and the resident population near each site. No source opened here publishes one, which is why the affected population could not be derived.
• Why the site count differs. It is 73 at end of 2024 in one brief, 79 in more than 30 states in another citing DOE, and more than 70 in 35 states in DOE material of 2022 vintage. None of the three gives its counting basis, so the difference cannot be attributed.
• What DOE does if the Act is never amended. The published liability estimate assumes an amendment and a preliminary operational date for interim storage. The alternative branch is not costed anywhere that was opened.
• Whether the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses would store commercial used fuel awaiting disposal, as distinct from reprocessing it. The published scope names reprocessing and waste management without separating the two.
• The age and licensed life of the casks. No opened source gives a count of dry storage casks by loading year, the terms of their storage licenses, or what happens to a cask whose term ends while no repository exists.
• How the liability range moves if reactors run to 80 years. The report says a longer operating life means more fuel and therefore more liability, and gives the direction without giving the figure.

See the evidence

The financial figures in this file were read directly from the DOE Agency Financial Report for FY2025, not from reporting about it, and the same document supplies both the amount paid and the statement that the remaining estimate depends on Congress amending the Act. Two independent 2026 briefs agree on about 95,000 metric tons and about 2,000 metric tons a year, and the Nuclear Waste Fund balance in one of them matches the audited figure. They disagree on the site count, 73 against 79, and neither states its counting basis, so both are carried with their dates rather than reconciled. The daily average of about 3.1 million dollars is arithmetic on the audited FY2025 Judgment Fund line and is not a published rate. The originating press release for the Yucca repeal bill could not be opened, because senate.gov returned HTTP 403 to the fetch, so that row is carried on a Nevada daily that was opened instead and that states both halves of the claim. This is a research-based definition, so observation_refs is empty and provenance_mode is press-derived.

People affected

Estimated range Not derivable

The reason and what is missing are listed under “What is missing” below