Back in February 2020, President Donald Trump had a problem. Running for re-election, his doublespeak on the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste project was making him look bad in Nevada.

The pesky facts weren’t in his favor.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) funding for the project was halted during President Barack Obama’s administration. Its licensing process was discontinued. It appeared to many that Yucca Mountain had finally met its match.

But then came Trump.

Despite promises that he had Nevada’s best interests in mind, for three consecutive years Trump’s budget had included more than $100 million to restart the licensing of a dump that Nevadans had long opposed.

The news got worse. In 2019 Trump’s DOE disclosed that, Nevada’s wishes aside, it had already shipped half a metric ton of plutonium from South Carolina to the Nevada National Security Site. Once again, the state was put on guard, and once again it forced the Trump administration to temporarily backtrack. The plutonium would remain in the state, but the shipments were discontinued.

With the tracks of his pro-Yucca sympathies easy to follow, Trump did what came naturally. He made something up, sprinkled it with all caps and exclamation points, and sent it out over social media.

“Nevada, I hear you on Yucca Mountain and my Administration will RESPECT you!” he tweeted to millions of followers, continuing, “Congress and previous Administrations have long failed to find lasting solutions – my Administration is committed to exploring innovative approaches—I’m confident we can get it done!”

With Nevada’s six electoral votes hanging in the balance, Trump’s position shifted to assurances of opposition despite those budget line items. One administration official comically offered, "The President’s 2021 budget will not have funding for the licensing of Yucca Mountain in it."

Whether Trump knew Yucca Mountain’s fraught history or cared became immaterial a few months after his saccharine tweet. He lost swing state Nevada by more than 33,000 votes and the general election by more than 7 million. With Joe Biden in the White House, Yucca Mountain wasn’t going anywhere. Like a ghost of old, the waste dump plan — already long insufficient for the nation’s waste storage needs — stopped rattling its chains and went silent again.

After dissembling in the 2024 presidential campaign about his knowledge of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation publication that seeks to restructure federal government and hand the president unprecedented executive power, Trump has spent his first days in office issuing executive orders that parrot the right-wing playbook.

Project 2025 calls for the promotion of nuclear power sources and notes, “Providing a plan for the proper disposal of civilian nuclear waste” is an “essential” part of the process. Although its rhetoric leaves some political wiggle room, the bottom line isn’t hard to find: “Yucca Mountain remains a viable option for waste management, and DOE should recommit to working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as it reviews DOE’s permit application for a repository.”

It also calls for “needed reforms” at DOE and implementing consent-based-siting, which allows individual states and sovereign indigenous nations to determine whether to store nuclear waste, and revamping the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

Although the changes proposed claim to give “the opportunity for Nevadans to have more partnership involvement with any nuclear facility at Yucca Mountain,” state leaders have consistently spoken out against the project for decades and continue to do so.

The fact that most Nevadans want no part of such a “partnership” appears to be beside the point.

Rapid changes in nuclear energy technology also complicate the issue of where the radioactive waste produced will be stored. The creation of small modular reactors (SMRs), such as those in development by the Oklo company, are being highly touted as the alternative energy generators of the future. Oklo’s first aurora reactor is scheduled to go online in 2027 in Idaho, according to published reports.

In December, Oklo signed a master power agreement with Nevada-based data center company Switch to provide 12 gigawatts of power generated by small nuclear power plants. Oklo touts its use of nuclear waste as fuel for its power plants. For its part, Switch’s website makes much of its use of renewable energy to power its colocation data centers in the state.

“The relationship with Oklo underscores our commitment to deploying advanced nuclear power at a transformative scale for our data centers, further enhancing our offerings of one of the world’s most advanced data center infrastructures to current and future Switch clients,” Switch Founder and CEO Rob Roy said in a statement. “By utilizing Oklo’s powerhouses, we aim to ensure that Switch remains the leader in data center sustainability while supporting our vision of energy abundance.”

That sounds pretty confident.

The assurances of a clean nuclear power future aside, those who have been battling on Nevada’s behalf on the nuclear waste storage issue are substantially more cautious. Former Nevada governor and U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan has opposed the effort that targeted Nevada as the nation’s nuclear waste dumpsite since the 1980s. As the chairman of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects, he says Project 2025 should be viewed as a warning to the state.

“The president has adopted virtually every policy statement found in Project 2025,” Bryan says. “The 2025 report includes provisions to reactivate the licensing process to locate high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. I think it’s a new threat to Nevadans and I hope that we can continue to marshal the opposition that has been bipartisan in Nevada since my time as governor in the 1980s. … I don’t think that’s a dead issue, unfortunately. I think there are people who want to restart and refund it. And the president has taken many different positions. He’s been for it before he’s been against it, and that doesn’t give me a high level of confidence that he will, in fact, abide by his promise to oppose it.”

Experience has also taught Bryan to remain skeptical of talk of a green nuclear energy future free of radioactive waste.

“The disposal of high-level nuclear waste for thousands of years needs to be resolved before serious consideration can be given to a new level of high-level waste coming from fission and fusion reactor proposals,” he says.

"Yucca Mountain cannot fix the nation's existing nuclear waste problem,” Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Fred Dilger says. "The nation needs a new site selection process and a new program. A futile attempt to license Yucca Mountain would be the most expensive, riskiest way forward. The state of Nevada remains adamant in its opposition to this bad program.”

With the ghost of Yucca Mountain rattling its chains once more, the state might again be forced to remind the Trump administration of that fact.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.