One of the most critical issues facing Idaho is one that has received little attention but has profound consequences for the future of our state – the agreement that would make Idaho the dumping ground for a third of the radioactive waste generated in our country.
It’s not surprising that Idahoans don’t know much about this issue. Gov. Brad Little, who is pursuing this agreement, and U.S. Sen. Jim Risch have said precious little or nothing about it, apparently wanting to keep it under the radar until they are safely re-elected in November.
New nuclear campus deal would require Idaho to accept, store spent nuclear fuel, radioactive waste
Congressman Mike Simpson applauded the agreement, saying it will bring jobs to his eastern Idaho district.
“Idaho didn’t become the nation’s nuclear leader by being afraid of hard problems. It became the leader by being the state willing to do the difficult, careful work that others wouldn’t. That’s still the right instinct now,” he wrote.
The Trump administration will choose three states to create what it calls a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.” The other states in the running for this dubious honor besides Idaho are Utah, Tennessee, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
The chosen states will each have to receive 33 percent of the radioactive waste generated by the other 47 states.
The public did not know that Gov. Little agreed to be one of the states until the Department of Energy announced it in late July. The memorandum of understanding that Little signed in July without informing Idahoans said: “The host agreement shall provide for the acceptance of out-of-state used nuclear fuel, spent fuel, and high-level radioactive waste.”
In its announcement, the Trump administration promised that the campus will boost manufacturing, create jobs, promote American energy independence, and attract other unnamed financial investments. Of course, we don’t know what this means since Little and our congressional delegation have not told us what’s in the fine print.
Idaho’s long history with nuclear waste
To put the importance of this issue in perspective, it is important to understand Idaho’s long and dark history with radioactive waste.
Starting in the 1940s, the federal energy site in eastern Idaho, which is now called the Idaho National Laboratory, became the repository for much of the nation’s nuclear radioactive waste.
The issue came to a head in the late 1970s when the press reported that the federal facility had regularly poured low-level radioactive liquid waste down an injection well above the Snake River Aquifer, which is the size of Lake Erie and provides much of the water for southern Idaho’s farmers and ranchers. There was also concern about other radioactive liquid waste being stored in containers buried above the aquifer.
I covered energy issues for the Idaho Statesman at the time and reported on the controversy over this waste. There was concern among Idaho’s political leaders because the federal site was also known for its porous volcanic soil and seismic activity. Coverage of the issue made front-page news for months.
That same year the General Accounting Office recommended that Idaho become a permanent repository for the nation’s radioactive waste. That proposal came nine years after the federal government promised to remove the existing waste from Idaho.
The GAO report was quickly opposed by then Gov. John Evans and even a Republican legislator from Boise who introduced a bill in the Legislature to ban any shipment of radioactive waste into our state. Legislators from eastern Idaho rallied and killed the bill.
Fast forward to 1988, when then Gov. Cecil Andrus finally had enough and promised Idahoans that he would block the federal government from transporting more radioactive waste from its Rocky Flats, Colorado, nuclear weapons plant. To emphasize his opposition, Andrus stationed a 24-hour state police detail on one of the shipments that made its way into the state as far as Blackfoot.
A picture of a muscular state trooper standing by the railroad car with his cruiser in the background made the front page of the New York Times and the story was covered by every national TV news outlet. The crisis was averted when the governor of Colorado agreed to take the waste back.
“I’m not a nuclear scientist,” Andrus later wrote, “but I understood on one point from the beginning: Radioactive garbage from the nuclear reservation in Idaho could not – must not – be allowed to come anywhere near the Snake River Aquifer.”
After Andrus left office, Republican Gov. Phil Batt took up the issue and negotiated a landmark 1995 agreement with the federal government that would prevent Idaho from becoming a permanent repository for nuclear waste, limit the waste Idaho would take on a temporary basis, and require the federal government to remove all the waste by 2035, a timeline that it is far from meeting at this point.
It is significant that Gov. Batt did not just sign the agreement with the federal government. He took the question to the people of Idaho to vote on whether to support his agreement which they did overwhelmingly.
“I think the best thing I did was telling (Idahoans) what it meant to them,” Batt told me in a 2019 interview before he died.
Andrus and Batt never gave up on the demand to have the waste at INL removed. They spent the rest of their lives holding the federal government accountable for removing the waste and keeping the issue in front of the people of Idaho.
Gov. Batt’s agreement demonstrated that the Idaho National Laboratory could conduct much-needed nuclear power research and development while still working toward the removal of all radioactive waste from the site. Idaho did not have to accept waste in exchange for being the nation’s leading laboratory for nuclear research and development.
There is more to this story than meets the eye
There is another twist to this story which has received no attention here in Idaho.
Last December, Trump Media & Technology (TMTG) announced that it was merging with the California-based TAE Technologies with an all-stock deal worth an estimated $6 billion. The new company said it plans to find a site and begin construction in 2026 on the “world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant to help power data centers critical to the artificial intelligence industry,” according to the Associated Press.
TAE is currently financially backed by Google and other high-tech investors. Once the merger with Trump Media & Technology is finished, the private company would become one of the first nuclear fusion companies on the American stock exchange.
Donald Trump’s revocable trust owns 114.75 million shares or about 41.5 percent of Trump Media & Technology. After the merger is completed, Trump’s trust would own about 21 percent of the new company. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust, although Donald Jr. is a trustee and has voting and investment authority.
Here’s the bottom line: The more money the new company earns building and selling fusion reactors, the more money Trump’s investment would be worth. One estimate is that if the value of the new company grows from $6 billion to $50 billion, the president’s investment could be worth more than $10 billion.
“He’s (Donald Trump) jumping into this industry just like he jumped into cryptocurrency a couple of years ago,” Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush Administration, told the Associated Press. “Just as the United States government is gonna get all involved in it. And it’s so obvious that there’s a huge conflict of interest.”
That is an understatement.
Last year Trump Media & Technology lost about 70 percent of its value, but after the announcement of the merger with TEA, its stock jumped by 34 percent.
But that’s only part of the story. Trump signed an executive order in May 2025 to have the federal government speed up the development, construction, and deployment of nuclear reactors. He plans to spend taxpa