The Republicans who dominate Utah’s politics — from the legislature to the governor’s mansion — are aggressively pursuing nuclear power, but a problem that had confounded fission supporters over the last century lingers: what to do with all the dangerous waste. Now the state is exploring whether to become a solution — by storing nuclear waste in the massive salt deposit in Millard County, a rural part of the state with a long history of meeting the West’s energy needs.
Caverns carved into that salt deposit already hold natural gas liquids, gasoline, and other fuels. Separate storage of hydrogen began there this year to support the massive Intermountain Power Plant’s shift from coal generation to carbon-free energy.
The Trump administration recently announced that it wants states to volunteer as hosts for “nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses” — sites that will take spent radioactive material for a variety of uses, such as storage, recycling, enrichment, fabrication, or powering manufacturing and data centers.
The same day in late January that the U.S. Department of Energy began soliciting states to host campuses, state Senator Derrin Owens, a Republican, contacted several other lawmakers, lobbyists, private equity investors, and Millard County officials, in an email obtained by the Millard County Chronicle Progress and shared with The Salt Lake Tribune.
“Friends,” Owens wrote on January 28, “HERE IT IS – This is Utah’s once in a lifetime opportunity to host one of these sites.” (Owens declined to comment for this story.)
Owens, who represents half of Millard County, noted that the group had “tried to lay the groundwork” for opportunities to store and repurpose nuclear waste with Curio, a startup headquartered in Washington D.C. that’s developing a process to recycle spent fuel.
Millard County’s salt dome — a remnant of an ancient ocean from the time dinosaurs roamed the earth — apparently makes Utah a particularly attractive candidate. The only other state interested in becoming a nuclear waste campus that has such a formation is Mississippi, according to Owens. “Let’s lead the west,” the state senator wrote.
Owens further referenced concerns among many in Utah about more liberal states on the West Coast, which historically bought coal and fossil-fuel generated electricity from Utah and other interior states, but have since pivoted toward energy sources that don’t contribute to climate change. Becoming a lab for nuclear material storage reuse could keep rural interior economies humming, while meeting the new carbon-free demands of growing population centers.
“They will need Utah once again,” Owens wrote, “if we land this fuel cycle.”
" data-credit="<a href='The Salt Lake Tribune' rel='noopener' target='_blank'>Francisco Kjolseth
Francisco Kjolseth
Owens called on the email recipients to pressure Governor Spencer Cox’s office and the Utah Office of Energy Development to “get on the phone” with the federal Department of Energy and “advocate for Utah.” The next day, Cox issued a statement to E&E News that said the state is evaluating whether it’s something Utah would be interested in working on with the federal government.
The governor’s office told The Tribune that the state has not yet committed to a specific project or partnership.
“America needs more reliable, affordable, and abundant energy,” Cox wrote in a statement last week, “and nuclear will be part of that future. As we evaluate the entire lifecycle, including advanced recycling, we will focus on Utah priorities, including safety, environmental stewardship, workforce development, and responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”
Cox has made “Operation Gigawatt” a primary focus of his second term, seeking to more than double Utah’s energy output over the next decade. While Cox calls it an “all-of-the-above” strategy that embraces all forms of energy, from solar panels to coal plants, his initiatives have focused heavily on nuclear development.
The governor’s Office of Energy Development declined to comment for this story. It also declined to provide any records associated with Utah’s interest in hosting a nuclear lifecycle campus, calling them classified and protected due to negotiations over real estate, without providing any more detail.
In Millard County, some see the prospect of storing nuclear waste in the salt caverns as a chance to bolster the area’s struggling job market. Others find the idea hard to stomach. “I don’t want it anywhere close to us,” said Vicki Lyman, a Millard County commissioner.
In September 2024, Owens invited Curio’s CEO, Edward McGinnis, to Utah’s Capitol Hill to discuss Curio’s approach to nuclear waste with lawmakers. Interview requests sent to Curio for this story did not receive a response.
Originally called “Curio Solutions,” the company was founded in 2021. McGinnis became Curio’s CEO the next year after spending more than 30 years working for the Energy Department. Curio secured $15 million in seed funding in April 2024 to develop technology for building reactors and recycling their spent fuel, as reported by Forbes. This February, the Energy Department announced that Curio was among the recipients of a $19 million grant to further research and develop nuclear fuel recycling.
Curio’s crown jewel is its patented NuCycle process, which has been demonstrated in labs but is not yet in commercial use. The company says that by recycling spent uranium and zirconium from nuclear plants, it can extract valuable materials like critical minerals and isotopes used in cancer treatments.
“There are hundreds of billions of dollars of resources and commodities” embedded in the spent radioactive fuel currently stored in more than 80 locations across the U.S., McGinnis told lawmakers. “We’re a mining business.”
When a typical plant uses nuclear fuel, the spent radioactive rods still contain about 96 percent of their “energy value,” according to McGinnis. “Curio is focused on bringing to market, for the first time, state-of-the-art advanced recycling,” he said, “done in a way that doesn’t force those who want to access nuclear to really swallow that poison pill, that elephant in the room … what are you going to do with the so-called waste?”
What was supposed to become the country’s repository for radioactive waste, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has been stalled for decades as a result of immense pushback from Nevadans and politicians, as well as lawsuits. But McGinnis called the current moment unique, with bipartisan support for more nuclear development. Both the Biden and Trump administrations adopted policies to support fission power.
The shift to electric vehicles, along with the proliferation of data centers to support the spread of artificial intelligence, has made global demand for energy spike. Utah leaders have called the need to control AI and build more electricity generation the “arms race” of the contemporary era and an issue of national security.
Recycling nuclear fuel doesn’t just produce valuable materials for manufacturing, medical, and national defense industries, McGinnis said. It can mean the radioactivity of the country’s waste stream takes only a few hundred years to decay instead of thousands of years.
“And (we) do it in an environmentally friendly way,” McGinnis said, that “avoids passing this waste down to generations.”
Curio partnered with the Idaho, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Sandia national laboratories late last year to demonstrate its technology. “Multiple states” have expressed interest in welcoming the company into their communities, McGinnis said, and he’s looking to deploy at least two or three facilities in the U.S. by the early 2030s.
“The facility will become a tech backbone,” the CEO said, creating high-paying jobs that don’t necessarily require advanced degrees.
The project could bring a windfall to Owens’ district, which has seen a hemorrhaging of jobs due to the closure of coal units at power plants, a slowdown in mining, and the shuttering of a Smithfield meat processing plant.
“Welcome to Utah,” Owens told McGinnis during the 2024 hearing with lawmakers. “In our mining communities, we know we have to bridge having baseload power from our coal industries. This is the dream to get there.”
In 2024, a series of state reports explored strategies for nuclear power in Utah; one that focused on waste fuels lauded Curio by name. It estimated that the company could create 3,000 jobs in the state, generate more than $400 million each year in tax revenue, and super-charge the state’s economy with $1.5 billion annually.
U.S. scientists developed the first technologies to recycle radioactive waste. But the country largely abandoned the practice amid fears that recycled waste could be used to create bombs or that it could leak and poison communities.
Nuclear power, however, is “one of the cleanest and safest of all energy sources,” according to the report from Utah’s Office of Energy Development. Numerous startups are now eyeing radioactive waste as a lucrative product, the report says, and “Utah should and can be primed to take advantage of this change, even leading the nation forward.”
The salt caverns in Millard County, the report added, would be “ideal” for storing nuclear material. Salt caves and mines have been used for radioactive repositories in New Mexico and Germany, with varying degrees of success.
Bill Wright, a Millard County commissioner, told the Chronicle Progress that the county is not in a position to pick winners and losers and is open to talking to people about all proposals that spur economic development.
Other local officials in Millard County were more hesitant. Millard County Commissioner Trevor Johnson said he didn’t think spent nuclear rods could be stored inside salt caverns without a method to deliver them safely deep below ground. A more secluded area, such as the county’s west desert, would be a more appropriate place to bury radioactive waste.
KC Bogue, the mayor of Delta City, the county’s largest community and gateway to the west desert region, said he supports new ways to develop energy, and that it needs to be efficient. Storing spent radioactive fuel in the county, though, is a different story.
“I don’t want to be the dumping grounds for nuclear waste,” Bogue said. “And I think that’s all we’d ever be.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utah Republicans see storing nuclear waste as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ on Mar 24, 2026.
