U.S. spent nuclear fuel, economic asymmetries, and the data center electricity demand challenge

The renewed interest in commercial nuclear energy to potentially satisfy increasing electricity demand requires solving the policy and regulatory impasse in backend fuel cycle management. This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing a technical and quantitative analysis of material flows under various fuel cycle options and linking the latter to associated financial costs. Under current U.S. law the government is responsible for spent nuclear fuel management, which exacerbates industry specific environmental, informational, intergenerational, and economic asymmetries, this led to policy failure, and enormous costs borne by U.S. taxpayers. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 provides an introduction. Section 2 reviews current literature. Section 3 provides some technical background. Section 4 presents a brief historical account of regulatory challenges, and an overview of legacy spent nuclear fuel. Section 5 presents the methodology, data used, and scenario selection. Section 6 develops scenarios 1-4. Section 7 discusses the results and section 8 concludes the paper and provides policy recommendations. We find that spent nuclear fuel management could cost taxpayers as much as $100 billion or produce revenues of around $11.3 billion. Policy recommendations to mitigate industry specific asymmetries, and lower costs to taxpayers are provided.