The Trump administration has selected five states as candidate locations to take atomic waste, in the latest attempt to solve the United States’s decadeslong deadlock over long-term storage for spent nuclear fuel. 

As President Donald Trump has pushed to quadruple domestic nuclear capacity by 2050 and rapidly expand the development of small advanced reactors and large AP1000s to meet the surging energy demand from artificial intelligence, there have been growing concerns around the amount of nuclear waste that the new projects will generate.