IdahoIs Ready.
The Department of Energy is choosing where America rebuilds the nuclear fuel cycle. Out of 28 proposals from 26 states, five are still standing, and Idaho is one of them. Add your name.
Add your name
Idaho residents. Takes about twenty seconds. Read the full petition
We’ll email you once to confirm. Your signature only counts after you click that link. That’s how we keep this roll clean enough to hand to a decision-maker.
10,000 Idahoans, from all 44 counties, by September 30, when this goes to the Department of Energy. 14 days left
The count shows how much of Idaho wants this. The counties show it isn’t one company town. The petition needs both.
Never thought about
nuclear fuel before?
Fair enough. Most people haven’t. Eight short answers covering what nuclear fuel is, what’s left in it after a reactor is done, and what Idaho is actually being asked to do. No background required. Underlined words have definitions; hover or tap them.
What is nuclear fuel?
Ceramic pellets of uranium about the size of a pencil eraser, stacked inside thin metal tubes and bundled into a fuel assembly. One pellet holds roughly as much energy as a tonne of coal.
Why does it get used up?
Inside the reactor, uranium atoms split (fission) and release heat. But splitting also leaves debris behind. Those fission products absorb neutrons and gradually choke the reaction, so the assembly has to come out long before the fuel is actually exhausted.
So what's left in it?
About 95% uranium and 1% plutonium. Only about 4% is genuine waste. By the Department of Energy's own accounting, less than 5% of the fuel's energy has been used when it comes out.
Where is all of it right now?
Sitting where it was made. Roughly 90,000 metric tons of used fuel is held in pools and dry casks at reactor sites across 37 states. None of it is being disposed of. It is all interim storage, and has been for decades.
What are the actual options?
Three. Leave it where it is indefinitely. Bury it in a geologic repository, except America doesn't have one and hasn't for forty years. Or recycle it, which France has done at industrial scale since the 1970s.
What does recycling really do?
It separates the usable material back out and makes new fuel from it, then locks the remainder into glass. It shrinks the volume needing permanent disposal by roughly five times. It does not eliminate it. That last fraction holds nearly all the radioactivity, and a permanent site is still needed somewhere.
What is being decided right now?
Where America builds the place that does this work. The Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus programme drew 28 proposals from 26 states. In July, DOE narrowed it to five (Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah) and signed non-binding agreements with each.
Why does Idaho keep coming up?
Because this started here. The world's first usable electricity from nuclear energy was generated on the Idaho desert in 1951. Idaho National Laboratory has run 55 reactors since, three of them reaching criticality this year, and it still has the test reactors, the hot cells and the people. What it doesn't have is the industrial-scale version, and neither does anywhere else in America.
What is a nuclear
lifecycle campus?
It’s the place where used nuclear fuel gets taken apart and made into new fuel, instead of sitting in a parking lot. A used fuel assembly is about 95% uranium and 1% plutonium. Only about 4% is genuine waste. Sorting that out takes eight steps, and no facility in America does all of them at industrial scale. Idaho runs a version of nearly every one. What’s being decided is where the country builds the full-size version. Click any step below.
Sealed casks arrive by rail or truck. The fuel assemblies (metal bundles about four metres tall and weighing half a tonne each) are lifted out underwater and racked in a pool at least nine metres deep. The water does two jobs at once: it carries away heat, and it blocks radiation so completely that workers stand at the rail looking down at it. Fuel typically sits here about five years before anything else happens.
What Idaho has today
INTEC has stored spent fuel for decades. A new 15,000-square-foot staging facility for 25 overpacks has cleared design review, with completion expected 2030–2032. Receiving commercial quantities from out of state would need more than that.
This is an illustration of the process, not a site plan. DOE has published no campus layout for NLIC. Idaho’s own submission asks DOE to commission a master plan, which means none exists yet. What’s shown here is what this kind of work involves and which pieces Idaho operates today.
This is what
lands here.
The Department of Energy has put figures on what a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus would bring to the state that hosts it. These are DOE’s numbers, in DOE’s own words, including the hedges.
“Nearly,” “up to” and “as much as” are DOE’s words, not ours. They are ceilings, and DOE has not published the methodology or the time horizon behind them.
DOE gave one number and didn’t split it. This breakdown applies Idaho National Laboratory’s own documented ratio: every 100 lab jobs support about 200 more across the state. Those 17,000 aren’t padding. They’re the machine shop in Idaho Falls, the trucking company in Blackfoot, the electrical contractor, the clinic, the school district hiring because families moved in. They’re also the jobs that land in counties nowhere near the site.
What’s already here, and doesn’t require a projection
Everything above is an estimate. This isn’t. Idaho National Laboratory runs one part of the fuel cycle today, and its FY-2024 economic impact is audited and published.
Sources: U.S. Department of Energy (July 2026 finalist announcement); Idaho National Laboratory FY-2024 Economic Impact Summary. We’d rather show you DOE’s hedges than hide them.
Not sure yet?
Good. Ask harder.
If you’re weighing this seriously, you have questions, and the honest ones are the hard ones. We answer them here, with sources, including the parts that aren’t flattering.
Wait, is this about making Idaho the nation's nuclear waste dump?
Used fuel from outside Idaho would come here. We're not going to soften that, because the agreement the Governor signed in July says so directly: a host agreement "shall provide for the acceptance of out-of-state used nuclear fuel, spent nuclear fuel, and high-level radioactive waste." Anyone telling you otherwise hasn't read it.
The distinction worth drawing is between material coming here to be worked on (recycled, and manufactured back into new fuel) and material coming here to be buried. Idaho drew that line itself in its proposal to DOE: no deep geologic repository beneath the site or above the Snake River Plain Aquifer.
And this isn't new work for Idaho. Used fuel has been received, examined, and stored on the Idaho desert for seventy-five years, under an agreement Idaho negotiated and its own regulators enforce. The question isn't whether this material exists. It exists today, in more than thirty states. The question is where the country does something useful with it, and who has the people to do it right.
Hasn't INL already contaminated the aquifer?
Yes. In the early decades, when this was the National Reactor Testing Station, waste was disposed of in ways no one would permit today, including injection directly into the aquifer. That's documented by the U.S. Geological Survey, it's public, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
Here's what happened next: Idaho stopped it. Direct injection ended between 1972 and 1984. In 1990, Idaho became the first state in the country to negotiate independent state monitoring of a federal nuclear site: our own scientists, our own samples, published on our own terms. And the numbers have gone one direction ever since: tritium hasn't exceeded the federal drinking water standard in the aquifer since 1997, iodine-129 is down roughly eight-fold since 1990, and no INL contamination has been found in the drinking water of any surrounding community.
The work isn't finished, and we'll show you exactly where it stands, including the wells still above standards today. But an operation that found its own problems, ended them, and spent forty years driving the numbers down is not an argument against Idaho. It's the reason to pick Idaho.
What about the 1995 Settlement Agreement?
This petition doesn't ask anyone to repeal it. That Agreement is the toughest deal any state in the country has with the Department of Energy, Idaho won it in federal court, and it belongs to the people who negotiate and enforce it, not to us.
And they do enforce it. Idaho's Department of Environmental Quality has been fining the federal government $6,000 a day since October 2016 over a missed cleanup commitment. In 2015 Idaho's Attorney General turned away two fuel shipments and declined a $20 million federal inducement until the state got what it was owed. That is what it looks like when a state holds Washington to its word.
Whatever comes next is a negotiation between Idaho and the federal government. We're signing our names to say we want the campus here, and that we trust the people who have already proven they'll drive a hard bargain for us.
I'm for nuclear power but unsure about fuel storage. Can I still sign?
Yes, and you're the person this petition was written for. Read the standards it asks for: rigorous safety standards, permanent protection of the Snake River Plain Aquifer, transparency with the communities that host this work, and lasting benefit for the Idahoans who make it possible. Those are the standards your name attaches to.
Signing doesn't mean you have every answer, and it doesn't mean signing off on decisions that haven't been made yet. It means you'd rather this work happen in the state with seventy-five years of doing it, our own regulators watching, and our own people in the jobs. The alternative is somewhere else, decided by someone else, while Idaho watches from the outside.
If you've got a specific question, ask it. A person will answer you.
Ask us anything about this
Someone reads every one and answers directly. If it’s a question others are asking too, we add it to this page anonymously with just your county attached.
The petition,
in full.
No summary, no fine print elsewhere. This is the entire text your name attaches to.
Idaho Should Lead America’s Nuclear Future
We, the undersigned residents of Idaho, urge the U.S. Department of Energy to select Idaho as the site of a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.
For seventy-five years, Idaho has done the work that made civilian nuclear power possible. The first usable electricity from nuclear energy was generated here in 1951. Fifty-five reactors have been built and operated on the Idaho desert, three of them this year. The expertise, the facilities, and the people are already in place.
We support Idaho hosting the full nuclear lifecycle: advanced reactor development, fuel fabrication, the recycling of used nuclear fuel, and responsible management of the materials that result. We believe this work should be done in America, and we believe Idaho is the right place to do it.
We ask that it be done on terms worthy of this state: rigorous safety standards, permanent protection of the Snake River Plain Aquifer, transparency with the communities that host it, and lasting economic benefit for the Idahoans who make it possible.
Idaho is ready. We are asking to lead.
Signatures are delivered on September 30, 2026 to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Governor’s office, and Idaho’s congressional delegation. Signing stays open afterwards, because DOE signs hosting agreements later than it names finalists. Only confirmed signatures are counted. See exactly how we count.
Breadth beats volume.
Ten thousand signatures from the counties nearest the site only proves that eastern Idaho wants this. Signatures from all forty-four prove that Idaho does. That’s the number that matters to a decision-maker, and it’s the one we’re chasing.
Counties shaded by signature count. Hover any county for detail, or switch to the table. 36 counties are still at zero; each one is a person who hasn’t been asked yet.
Atomic Frontier is
more than a petition.
Est. 2026 · Eastern Idaho
It’s the center of American nuclear energy, and we intend to build it here.
Every technology industry has a place that became its center. Nobody assigned it. The talent, the capital, the regulators and the willingness all showed up in the same square miles at the same time. Nuclear energy is having that moment right now, and it does not yet have that place.
Idaho has a seventy-five-year head start. The high desert here holds the test reactors, the fuel facilities, the examination labs, and the people who know how to use them. What it hasn’t had is a name for the thing being built, and a public that claims it out loud.
That’s what Atomic Frontier is for. The NLIC campaign is where we start: Campaign 01, not the whole enterprise. Whatever DOE decides this year, the work of making this the center of American nuclear energy is a decade-long project, and the people signing their names right now are the first of it.