Cherry-Picking the Atom

New Hampshire told the federal government it wants nuclear reactors. It also told the federal government it doesn’t want waste storage, fuel processing, or reprocessing. The state that quietly repealed its own nuclear waste ban fifteen years ago is now shopping the nuclear lifecycle à la carte — and nobody in Concord wants to talk about where the spent fuel goes.

On April 1, the New Hampshire Department of Energy submitted a statement of interest to the federal government in response to a Trump administration request for information about potential “nuclear innovation lifecycle campuses.” The letter, prefaced by Gov. Kelly Ayotte, signaled openness to expanding nuclear development in the state, pointed to Seabrook Station’s existing infrastructure, and noted that New Hampshire is the only state in New England without a moratorium on new nuclear construction.

The federal concept is ambitious. The U.S. Department of Energy envisions these campuses as facilities that “must support functions such as fuel fabrication, enrichment, reprocessing used nuclear fuel, and disposition of waste,” and could also house advanced reactors, manufacturing, and data centers. The word “must” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The feds designed the lifecycle campus as a package — the whole nuclear supply chain under one roof, from fresh fuel to spent rods.

New Hampshire’s response unpacked that package and sent most of it back.

According to documents obtained by the New Hampshire Bulletin, the state’s energy department indicated “low” interest in spent fuel storage, fuel processing or reprocessing, data center construction, advanced manufacturing, and several other categories the federal government identified as possible campus components. What New Hampshire wanted was the reactor. The advanced nuclear technology. The part that generates electricity and lowers bills and looks good in a press release.

Everything else — the unglamorous, expensive, politically toxic business of handling what a reactor produces after it splits the atom — got a polite no.

The Lifecycle Without the Life

The phrase “lifecycle campus” exists for a reason. The nuclear fuel cycle is, as the name suggests, a cycle. Uranium gets mined, enriched, fabricated into fuel rods, burned in a reactor, removed as spent fuel, and then either stored, reprocessed, or disposed of. Every stage generates waste. Every stage requires infrastructure, security, and regulatory oversight. The federal government packaged these stages together because separating them is exactly what the country has been doing for seventy years — and it hasn’t worked.

The United States has no permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was supposed to be that repository. It was authorized, excavated, studied, and then abandoned after decades of state opposition. Every commercial reactor in the country — including Seabrook Station — stores its spent fuel on site, in pools and dry casks that were designed as temporary solutions and have become permanent ones by default. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 requires the federal government to build a centralized disposal facility. Forty-four years later, no such facility exists.

That is the context in which Trump’s DOE floated the lifecycle campus concept: a way to restart the national conversation about nuclear waste by bundling it with the parts of nuclear energy that politicians actually want to talk about. New reactors. Clean power. Jobs. Lower electricity bills. The campus was designed so that states couldn’t take the candy and leave the vegetables on the plate.

New Hampshire took the candy.

Read that table again. Every function the federal government said a lifecycle campus must include, New Hampshire rated as low interest. The only component the state wanted is one the feds listed as optional. New Hampshire didn’t apply for a lifecycle campus. It applied for a reactor with a federal subsidy attached.

The Law That Vanished

New Hampshire’s relationship with nuclear waste has a history that the Ayotte administration’s filing does not mention. In 1986, when the U.S. Department of Energy identified a 78-square-mile area around Hillsborough as a potential site for a deep underground nuclear waste repository, the state revolted. One hundred and thirty-seven towns passed warrant articles opposing the burial, storage, transportation, and production of high-level nuclear waste in New Hampshire. The Legislature responded by passing the High-Level Radioactive Waste Act, which established official state policy against hosting a waste facility and created legal mechanisms to fight federal siting efforts.

That law stood for twenty-five years. Then, in 2011, it was repealed.

The repeal was not debated. It was not the subject of public hearings. It did not make the news. It was folded into the state budget bill as part of a revision to the duties of the Office of Energy and Planning. Rep. Renny Cushing, the Hampton Democrat who co-founded the Clamshell Alliance to fight Seabrook’s construction, discovered the repeal years later while drafting unrelated legislation. “I found out about it almost by accident,” Cushing told NH Business Review. “There were no public hearings on this repeal. So, New Hampshire has become the first state that’s rescinded its opposition to having a nuclear waste site here.”

Cushing died in March 2022. His bill to reinstate the ban was defeated in 2020. New Hampshire remains the only New England state without either a nuclear moratorium or an active statute opposing high-level waste storage. The Bulletin reported this month that the 2011 repeal “and a subsequent attempt by the late former Rep. Renny Cushing to reintroduce legislation on the topic, opposing the siting of a high-level waste facility in New Hampshire, was defeated in 2020.”

The sequence matters. In 2011, New Hampshire quietly removed its legal barrier to hosting nuclear waste. In 2026, it told the federal government it has “low interest” in waste storage. The barrier is gone, but the state still doesn’t want the waste. It wants the legal flexibility to say yes without ever having to say yes. That is not a policy. It is a position designed to survive a press conference.

The Pattern

If this were an isolated case — one filing, one agency, one day — it would be a footnote. It is not isolated. Ayotte’s nuclear campus submission fits a pattern of governance that selects for upside and refuses to account for cost.

Last month, the governor vetoed HB 451, the bipartisan paint recycling bill. The program would have charged a per-can fee — estimated at 75 to 90 cents on a gallon of paint — to fund recycling infrastructure that municipalities currently pay for through property taxes. The paint industry supported it. Seventeen of seventeen committee members voted for it. Ayotte wrote “NO SALES TAX” in red ink on the bill and posted it to social media. The House failed to override last week.

The New Hampshire Bulletin’s editorial board drew the connection before anyone else in state media: if Republican leadership can’t accept a 90-cent fee on a can of paint to keep latex out of landfills, how will it handle waste from small modular reactors? The question is rhetorical. The filing answers it. New Hampshire won’t handle the waste. It will check “low interest” and move on.

The same budget that zeroed out $35 million in housing production funding — the Invest NH and Affordable Housing Fund programs that Granite State Report covered last week — is the budget context in which Ayotte is courting nuclear development that would require significant state investment. The U.S. DOE’s campus concept explicitly states that any campus “would also require state investment.” A governor who eliminated housing money because the budget couldn’t support it is now bidding for a nuclear campus that will cost orders of magnitude more.

What’s Happening Next Door

While New Hampshire was telling the federal government it wanted reactors, its neighbors were running in the opposite direction.

On April 14, Maine’s legislature approved a first-in-the-nation temporary moratorium on large data centers — facilities consuming more than 20 megawatts of power. The bill awaits Gov. Janet Mills’s signature. The driver is electricity costs. Maine already has some of the highest rates in the country, and legislators concluded that massive new energy consumers would push prices higher before the grid could absorb them.

On the same day, the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI for operating 27 unpermitted methane gas turbines to power its Colossus 2 data center in South Memphis. The turbines, built without required Clean Air Act permits, sit near homes, schools, and churches in a predominantly Black community. Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center are representing the plaintiffs. Penalties could reach $124,400 per day of violation.

This is not hypothetical. It is what happens when states let the bulldozers run ahead of the permits. Maine saw it coming and put up a wall. Memphis didn’t, and a federal judge is now sorting it out. New Hampshire, meanwhile, is inviting nuclear development while demonstrating — through the paint veto, the housing cuts, the budget posture — that it won’t pay for the infrastructure that comes with the development it’s chasing.

New Hampshire’s own filing identifies HB 672, the 2025 law that enables off-grid energy generation, as a vehicle for nuclear projects to “serve large loads like data centers or industrial users.” The state is marketing itself as a place where nuclear-powered data centers can operate outside the traditional grid — even as the state next door bans large data centers entirely and the federal government is dealing with the consequences of data centers built without proper oversight.

Seabrook’s Ghost Reactor

The state’s filing identifies Seabrook as the most promising site for a nuclear campus, noting that the station was designed for two reactors but only one was completed. The second reactor was abandoned after cost overruns pushed the Seabrook project billions of dollars over budget — a disaster that forced Public Service of New Hampshire into Chapter 11, the first investor-owned utility bankruptcy since the Great Depression.

The filing frames the unbuilt second reactor as an opportunity: existing infrastructure, available land, an experienced nuclear workforce, and a community that already hosts a reactor. The Seabrook Select Board sent a letter of support. NextEra, which owns and operates the station, sent another. StarCube, a Portsmouth-based micronuclear startup, said it intends to build a pilot facility in New Hampshire.

What none of those letters addresses is what happens to the waste. Seabrook Station already stores its spent fuel on site in dry casks — the same temporary solution that every reactor in the country uses because the permanent solution was never built. Adding a second reactor, or an advanced reactor of any design, adds to the spent fuel inventory at a site with no pathway for removing it. The federal lifecycle campus was designed to address that problem. New Hampshire’s filing explicitly declines to participate in the solution.

Doug Bogen of the Seabrook Anti-Pollution League has been raising this point for months. Investing in nuclear, he argues, carries an “opportunity cost” — resources directed at technology that is years or decades from commercial deployment rather than renewable energy that can be built today. But the opportunity cost Bogen identifies is the polite version. The sharper cost is the one the filing reveals: New Hampshire wants to generate more nuclear waste at Seabrook while claiming low interest in storing or processing any of it.

The Atomic Privilege, Applied Locally

In The Atomic Privilege, the hierarchy is between nations: those that possess nuclear weapons and those that don’t. The weapon states make the rules. The non-weapon states absorb the risks. The NPT codifies the arrangement. The IAEA enforces it. The system runs on a deal that weapon states wrote and have never fully kept: non-weapon states accept restrictions; in return, they get access to peaceful nuclear technology.

The same hierarchy operates domestically, between the states that host nuclear facilities and the communities within them. The electricity goes onto the New England grid and powers homes from Nashua to New Bedford. The spent fuel stays in casks on the Seacoast. The jobs and tax revenue accrue to Seabrook. The contamination risk and decommissioning bill accrue to Seabrook, too — but those show up on a different ledger and a longer timeline. When New Hampshire tells the federal government it wants reactors but not waste infrastructure, it is doing what states have done with nuclear waste for forty years: collecting the kilowatts and mailing the spent fuel rods to the future.

That is the atomic privilege in miniature. The power to choose which parts of the nuclear lifecycle apply to you. The assumption that the casks will go somewhere, eventually, without New Hampshire having to say where. Forty-four years after the Nuclear Waste Policy Act required a permanent repository, no state has agreed to host one. New Hampshire just made its position clear: not here, but also, please build us a reactor.

The ceasefire clock on the Iran war ticks down to April 21. The naval blockade of Iranian ports is in its third day. At the center of the conflict is the same question that animates New Hampshire’s campus filing: who gets to benefit from nuclear technology, and who bears the risk? Iran wants the atom for energy and deterrence. The United States says Iran can’t be trusted with it. New Hampshire wants the atom for cheap electricity. The federal government designed a campus that would make states share the burden. New Hampshire said no to the burden. Yes to the electricity.

The selectivity is the story. Not the reactors. Not the waste. The choice to treat the nuclear lifecycle as a buffet — take what you like, leave what you don’t — when the physics, the economics, and forty years of failed policy all say the same thing: the waste comes with the power. It always has. Refusing to plan for it doesn’t make it disappear. It makes it someone else’s inheritance.

A governor who vetoes a 90-cent paint fee because it looks like a tax is not going to build a spent fuel repository. A legislature that zeroes out housing funds is not going to fund nuclear waste infrastructure. A state that repealed its own waste ban so quietly that nobody noticed for five years is not going to have a serious public conversation about what it means to host a nuclear campus.

Dozens of states responded to the federal request for information. Many of them probably checked the same boxes New Hampshire did — yes to reactors, no to waste. That is exactly the problem the lifecycle campus was designed to solve, and it is exactly the problem that states like New Hampshire are determined to perpetuate.

The filing is in. The state’s position is on the record. New Hampshire wants the atom. It just doesn’t want to clean up after it.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of The Atomic Privilege.