Utah's Risky Gamble With Nuclear Power

An Overview

Utah is being targeted for risky and expensive nuclear energy projects, including proposed Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which could leave communities with toxic waste, long-term debt, and serious health risks. While proponents claim SMRs are safer and more flexible than traditional reactors, and will help fight climate change, HEAL Utah has major questions about the viability of nuclear as a “climate solution” due its slow timelines, its high cost, and remains deeply concerned by the risks it poses to environmental and public health.

HEAL Utah believes Utah’s energy future must prioritize public health, economic resilience, and environmental protection. We advocate for transparent, community-led decision-making rooted in informed consent and focused on clean, renewable energy development. An energy transition must also support impacted workers and communities, ensuring that energy solutions benefit, not burden, Utahns.

The Risks of Nuclear Energy in Utah

High Economic Costs and Financial Risk

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are costly, unproven, and economically unviable. The failure of the NuScale SMR project in Utah demonstrated how nuclear projects often require massive taxpayer subsidies, increase energy prices for ratepayers, and yet still may collapse under their own escalating costs. Pursuing nuclear energy diverts vital resources away from proven, cheaper solutions like geothermal, solar, wind, and battery storage. If Utah continues down this path, ratepayers could be locked into paying for expensive, delayed, or failed projects for decades.

Slow Timelines

We know that reducing greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade is critical to our ability to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Nuclear power projects have consistently run behind schedule (and over cost), with the result being that outdated, polluting fossil fuel projects operate for even longer, increasing emissions during a time when we are edging ever closer to the tipping point for climate disasters. Even with “streamlined” approval processes that come with their own set of issues, we still cannot meet our energy and climate needs in time by relying on nuclear energy.

Lack of Transparency

Key community concerns, such as safety, waste, water use, evacuation plans, and costs, are often glossed over by decision-makers and developers. Without full public engagement, new reactor projects risk repeating past harms and exposing communities to spills, contamination, and serious health risks, especially with expedited approval processes that cut out public participation.

Long-Term Toxic Waste Management

There is no national solution for storing nuclear waste, meaning communities near reactors, whether traditional or SMRs, could be stuck with highly radioactive waste for decades, or even centuries. Spent fuel rods and other toxic byproducts remain hazardous for thousands of years, far outlasting the reactors themselves. While on-site storage of high level waste may be the best and only solution in the short term, over time it creates a serious contamination risk. Beyond the reactor site, communities may be affected by the entire nuclear fuel chain from mining and milling, to transport and decommissioning.

Increased Public Health Risks

Radioactive leaks, accidents, and exposure to uranium dust or contaminated air, water, and soil pose serious health risks, especially for vulnerable populations like children, seniors, and historically marginalized communities. The full lifecycle of nuclear energy impacts many rural and indigenous Utah communities, who are already burdened by long-term radioactive exposure. Even low levels of exposure can increase the risk of cancer, birth defects, immune system damage, and other serious health problems.

Small Steps You Can Take

Your voice can help prevent costly mistakes and protect Utah’s environment, economy, and public health.

As An Individual

Speak up, and submit public comments asking key questions about nuclear development projects: Attend public meetings, contact your representatives, write letters to local newspapers and news outlets.
Get informed and Share your findings: Talk with your friends, family, and neighbors. Post about nuclear risks on social media. Share HEAL Utah’s updates and action alerts.

As A Community

- Monitor and attend your city council and planning commission meetings for local proposals to develop reactors
- Organize concerned members of your community, and create a united voice to let local and state elected officials know that communities have concerns and want a say in whether nuclear energy gets sited near their homes.
- Coordinate public comments to city councils, to your state legislature, to the Governor, and to regulatory agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, and State Division of Management of Waste Management and Radiation Control.

Advocate for realistic, equitable, and truly clean sources of renewable energy to power our state.

Take Further Action

The uranium industry in Utah has a legacy of environmental and health impacts on residents, especially in the southwest where the majority of mining and milling has historically occurred.

Currently, the only licensed uranium mill operating in the United States is the Energy Fuels Uranium Mill, which is located on land sacred to the Ute Mountain Ute tribe and many other indigenous communities one mile east of Bears Ears National Monument and less than five miles north of Ute Mountain Ute White Mesa Tribal lands.

Learn more about the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and White Mesa Concerned Community’s advocacy against the mill’s decades-long contamination of their air, water, and land in our blogpost. There, you can stand in solidarity with our partners by signing their petition to oppose the White Mesa uranium mill!