New Hampshire wants nuclear power. It just doesn’t want the waste that comes with it.

Governor Kelly Ayotte’s April 1 letter to the U.S. Department of Energy reads like a menu order at a restaurant where someone else is paying: advanced reactors, yes; spent fuel storage, no; fuel reprocessing, no; data centers, no. The state’s bid to host a federal “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus” at Seabrook raises a question that has haunted nuclear policy for decades — and one that applies as much to nations as to states: Who gets the power, and who gets the poison?

You don’t need to look overseas to see that hierarchy at work. You can see it right here, in the gap between what Ayotte asked for and what she quietly declined.

The À La Carte Bid

The federal Department of Energy issued its request for information in January, inviting states to express interest in hosting what it called “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses” — integrated facilities that would support activities across the entire nuclear fuel cycle. The DOE’s own description was explicit: any such campus “must support functions such as fuel fabrication, enrichment, reprocessing used nuclear fuel, and disposition of waste,” and “could” support additional facilities, including advanced nuclear reactors.

New Hampshire responded on April 1. In a letter prefacing the state’s response, Ayotte signaled openness to additional nuclear development, pointed to Seabrook Station, and pitched New Hampshire for the job. The New Hampshire Department of Energy’s accompanying document identified Seabrook as a potential site, noting the existing nuclear footprint, and included letters of support from NextEra Energy (which owns and operates Seabrook Station), the Seabrook Select Board, the Portsmouth-based micronuclear startup StarCube, California reactor company Deep Fission, utility Eversource, and Concord engineering firm Nobis.

But then came the fine print.

The state Department of Energy declared “low” interest in spent fuel storage, fuel processing or reprocessing, data center construction, and advanced manufacturing. In other words, New Hampshire wanted the crown jewel — advanced reactors — while declining essentially everything else the DOE said a campus “must” include.

New Hampshire’s Nuclear Campus Bid: What Ayotte Requested vs. What She Rejected

Campus Component	DOE Requirement	NH Interest Level
Advanced Nuclear Reactors	“Could” support	High
Fuel Fabrication	“Must” support	Low
Enrichment	“Must” support	Low
Fuel Reprocessing	“Must” support	Low
Spent Fuel Storage/Disposition	“Must” support	Low
Data Center Construction	“Could” support	Low
Advanced Manufacturing	“Could” support	Low

The pattern is unmistakable. Ayotte wants the technology that generates electricity and federal investment dollars. She does not want the parts that involve hazardous materials, long-term liability, and political risk. In the framework of The Atomic Privilege, this is what it looks like when someone wants nuclear capability and expects someone else to deal with the consequences.

The Seabrook Ghost

To understand why this bid matters, you have to understand the site being offered. Seabrook Station is not just any nuclear plant. It is a $6.5 billion cautionary tale.

When the Public Service Company of New Hampshire first proposed a nuclear plant at Seabrook in the late 1960s, they envisioned two reactors producing 2.2 million kilowatts of electricity at an estimated cost of under $1 billion. What the state got instead was 19 years of construction delays, cost overruns, lawsuits, mass arrests, and the largest utility bankruptcy in American history up to that time.

Only one reactor was ever completed. By the time Seabrook Station finally received its full-power operating license in 1990, costs had ballooned to approximately $6.5 billion — roughly seven times the original estimate. The owners voted to cancel the second reactor in 1984 at 25 percent completion, after $800 million had already been spent. The Public Service Company of New Hampshire filed for bankruptcy in January 1988 — the largest investor-owned utility failure in American history at the time.

The protests were legendary. In 1977, over 1,400 demonstrators were arrested at the construction site in one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in American history. Six New Hampshire towns within the emergency planning radius refused to participate in evacuation planning. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and his state’s attorney general waged a years-long legal campaign against the plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself described its oversight of the project as “a paradigm of fragmented and uncoordinated government decision making” and “a system strangling itself and the economy in red tape.”

Now Ayotte is pointing to Seabrook — specifically the empty pad where the second reactor was never built — as the logical site for a new nuclear future. The pitch depends on selective amnesia: remembering Seabrook’s existing infrastructure while forgetting the financial catastrophe, the community opposition, and the fundamental question that was never resolved.

That question is: what do you do with the waste?

The Poison Nobody Wants

Spent nuclear fuel remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, with the period of “greatest concern” to human health lasting at least 10,000 years, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required the federal government to develop a centralized, permanent storage solution. More than four decades later, no such solution exists.

The closest the country ever came was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, designated by Congress in 2002 as the nation’s repository. But Nevada fought back — through lawsuits, state water law, and political leverage. The state denied the DOE’s water-use applications, blocked drilling operations, and made progress on the project essentially impossible. President Trump himself killed any remaining hope for Yucca Mountain in 2020, tweeting his opposition from the campaign trail in a bid for Nevada’s electoral votes.

New Hampshire knows this story intimately, because the state almost became a Yucca Mountain of its own.

In 1986, the DOE announced that a 78-square-mile area of granite bedrock centered on the town of Hillsborough was one of a dozen sites across the country under consideration for a deep underground nuclear waste repository. The geology was appealing — a massive pluton of granite running 60 miles through western New Hampshire, the kind of stable mineral formation that could theoretically shield radiation for millennia. The human geography was less cooperative. Residents understood that multiple surrounding towns could be seized through eminent domain. “Don’t Dump on Me!” became their battle cry.

The state legislature responded by passing the High-Level Radioactive Waste Act, establishing official state policy in opposition to any nuclear waste facility in New Hampshire. The DOE eventually abandoned Hillsborough. New Hampshire had successfully deployed the same playbook Nevada would use at Yucca Mountain: local resistance, political pressure, legal barriers.

But here is the part of the story that almost nobody remembers, and that no other outlet has reported in the context of Ayotte’s current nuclear ambitions: that protective law was quietly repealed in 2011, buried in the state budget bill without public hearings. The late Rep. Renny Cushing, a Hampton Democrat and Clamshell Alliance co-founder, discovered the repeal almost by accident years later. His attempt to reinstate the ban was defeated in 2020. Today, New Hampshire has no statutory barrier to hosting a high-level radioactive waste facility — making it, functionally, one of the few states in the country that has actively dismantled its own defenses against becoming a nuclear waste dump.

Now the governor is inviting the federal nuclear apparatus back in, while simultaneously declaring “low interest” in waste storage. So here is the question: if New Hampshire gets advanced reactors, where does the waste go? And if the state has already repealed its only legal protection against hosting a waste repository, who exactly is going to say no when the DOE comes looking for a place to put the spent fuel?

The “Campus” Euphemism

The Trump administration’s rebranding of this initiative deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The phrase “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus” is carrying a lot of weight. It conjures images of Silicon Valley-style hubs — clean rooms, researchers in lab coats, venture capital, high-tech jobs. What it actually describes is an integrated facility that would handle spent nuclear fuel that stays lethally radioactive for millennia, and that must be kept from human contact for longer than recorded civilization has existed.

The rebranding is deliberate. The DOE tried for decades to find a state willing to accept a “nuclear waste repository.” Nobody wanted it. So the Trump administration bundled waste handling with the more appealing elements of the nuclear fuel cycle — reactors, enrichment, job creation — and called it a “campus.” As U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed it, each campus could attract “$50 billion in capital investment from the private sector.”

It’s a bait-and-switch, and it’s working. States can cherry-pick the elements they want, as Ayotte has done, while the DOE uses the integrated campus concept to eventually site the less popular functions — waste storage, fuel reprocessing — wherever it has already established a foothold. The campus gets its foot in the door with reactors and jobs. The waste comes later.

Doug Bogen, president of the Seabrook Anti-Pollution League, sees it for what it is. Bogen argues that nuclear investment diverts resources from renewable energy that could be deployed now — an “opportunity cost” the state can’t afford. He worries about radiation and health impacts from expanded operations at Seabrook. And his prescription is blunt: stop generating waste. “If you find yourself in a hole,” Bogen has said, “the first thing you do is stop digging.”

The New Hampshire Department of Energy isn’t worried. Legislative Liaison Megan Stone says the agency doesn’t see waste as a barrier, and points to dry cask storage as “a safe and effective method of storing spent nuclear fuel until it is collected by the federal government.” Catch the key phrase: “until it is collected by the federal government.” That collection has never occurred at any commercial nuclear site in the United States. There is no plan for it. There is no timeline. There is no facility to receive it. The federal government has been legally obligated to take this waste since 1998 and has paid utilities billions in damages for its failure to do so. The waste sits where it was generated.

The Only State Without a Moat

Here is something Ayotte’s letter frames as a selling point but that should keep Granite Staters up at night: New Hampshire is the only state in New England without a moratorium on new nuclear development.

That distinction, combined with the 2011 repeal of the high-level waste ban, makes New Hampshire uniquely exposed. Every other New England state has erected at least one legal barrier to nuclear expansion. New Hampshire has dismantled both of its protections and is actively courting federal nuclear investment.

The legislature is pushing in the same direction. Bills advancing this session would allow utilities to own advanced nuclear reactors up to 300 megawatts. Ayotte’s March executive order directed the state Department of Energy to develop a nuclear roadmap — one that is required to address waste storage and disposition. That roadmap is due within six months. And while Ayotte recently joined all six New England governors in a bipartisan statement supporting advanced nuclear, endorsing reactors in a press release is a very different thing from accepting a waste facility in your backyard. Hillsborough and Yucca Mountain proved that.

Atomic Privilege, Close to Home

I wrote The Atomic Privilege about the global version of this game: a small club of nuclear weapon states controls the technology, sets the rules, and distributes the benefits, while everyone else is expected to accept the risks and keep quiet. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the rulebook. The five original weapon states wrote it. Everyone else signed it.

The domestic version works the same way. The federal government controls the nuclear fuel cycle, writes the regulations, and dangles the investment dollars. States compete for the reactors and the jobs. But the consequences — the waste, the contamination, the liability that outlasts every governor who ever signed a letter of interest — get pushed toward whichever community has the least political power to say no.

Ayotte’s bid is this dynamic in miniature. New Hampshire wants to be a nuclear-privileged state — collecting the reactors, the federal checks, and the energy independence. It does not want to be a nuclear-burdened state — the one that ends up storing the spent fuel, cleaning up the contamination, and absorbing costs that will still be accruing when your grandchildren are dead. The problem is simple: you cannot have one without the other. Every reactor produces waste. Every watt of nuclear electricity creates a disposal obligation that will outlast the reactor, the utility, the governor, and the government that authorized it.

The Seabrook site itself is proof. Spent fuel from more than three decades of operations sits in dry cask storage on the coast right now. Nobody is coming to collect it.

The Energy Cost Question

The sales pitch for new nuclear at Seabrook writes itself: New Hampshire has some of the highest electricity costs in the nation, nuclear already provides roughly 57 percent of the state’s power, and advanced reactors could reduce dependence on volatile natural gas. Fine. But the financial history of nuclear power in this state should make any ratepayer reach for their wallet and hold on tight. The original Seabrook project was projected to cost under $1 billion for two reactors. It delivered one reactor for $6.5 billion, bankrupted its primary utility, and saddled ratepayers with decades of inflated bills. The NRC’s own post-mortem acknowledged the catastrophe.

Advanced reactor technology promises to be different — smaller, modular, cheaper, faster to build. But as the NH Bulletin has reported, these technologies are still years to a decade or more from commercial deployment in the United States. Fuel reprocessing, another activity the DOE envisions for its lifecycle campuses, does not currently occur commercially anywhere in the country. The private-sector letters of support included in New Hampshire’s bid come from companies like Deep Fission, whose modular reactor pilot in Kansas has already sparked local protests, and StarCube, a startup that has yet to construct its pilot facility.

The campus would also require state investment alongside federal funding, according to the DOE. How much, and from whose pocket, remains unspecified.

The 2026 Political Context

There is a U.S. Senate seat open in New Hampshire for the first time in decades. Jeanne Shaheen is retiring. Energy policy will be a campaign issue. Ayotte knows this, and her nuclear push is calibrated accordingly — she has made energy the centerpiece of her first-term agenda, including the March executive order directing the development of a state nuclear roadmap.

The nuclear campus bid aligns neatly with Trump administration priorities. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has described the campus initiative as central to the president’s vision for “revitalizing America’s nuclear base,” and has said he wants to see “dozens of nuclear plants under construction” before leaving office. For Ayotte, being an early and enthusiastic partner in that vision positions New Hampshire favorably for federal investment at a time when dozens of states are competing for the same dollars.

But the politics cut both ways. If the campus concept advances and the waste question resurfaces — as it inevitably will — the state’s lack of statutory protections could become a political liability. The Hillsborough fight of 1986 is within living memory. The families who faced eminent domain, the communities that mobilized under the “Don’t Dump on Me” banner — many of them are still here. Their children and grandchildren vote.

And the question they will ask is the same one that has defined nuclear politics since Hiroshima: if we accept the reactors, will we be forced to accept the waste?

Governor Ayotte’s April 1 letter suggests she believes New Hampshire can have one without the other. History — from Hillsborough to Yucca Mountain, from Seabrook’s $6.5 billion fiasco to the dry casks sitting silently on the coast right now — says she’s wrong.

The nuclear roadmap is due in six months. When it arrives, Granite Staters should read the fine print — because the last time a nuclear promise came to New Hampshire, the fine print cost $6.5 billion and the waste is still here.