(The Center Square) — East Feliciana, St. Charles and Lafourche parishes have emerged as the Louisiana communities showing the strongest interest in hosting a sprawling federal nuclear energy campus that could eventually receive and recycle spent nuclear fuel from across the country, according to sources familiar with the initiative.

Louisiana faces a Wednesday deadline to submit its proposed agreement to the U.S. Department of Energy. The state sought additional time to finish negotiations, but DOE denied the extension request.

The compressed timeline leaves Louisiana officials negotiating the potential terms of one of the most consequential nuclear projects proposed in the state in decades while simultaneously determining which communities are willing to host it.

DOE launched the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus initiative in January, envisioning sites that could combine uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, nuclear reactors, used-fuel recycling, advanced manufacturing and radioactive waste disposal. Louisiana was one of five states initially selected in July from 28 applications submitted by 26 states.

The department has since expanded the group of participating states.

East Feliciana, St. Charles and Lafourche are now drawing the most serious local interest in Louisiana, sources said. State officials also spoke with leaders from the Bossier-Shreveport area.

On Sept. 21st, East Feliciana police jury approved a resolution in support of bringing the campus to the parish.

St. Charles Parish is particularly notable because it is home to Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear plant, while East Feliciana sits near Entergy’s River Bend nuclear station in neighboring West Feliciana Parish.

The proposal offers potentially enormous economic benefits, but it also ties Louisiana directly to a decades-old federal problem that has already cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

The federal government agreed to begin taking possession of commercial spent nuclear fuel in 1998. It never did.

DOE’s latest financial statements show the Treasury’s Judgment Fund had paid $12.2 billion to utilities through Sept. 30, 2025, because the government failed to take the waste as promised. DOE estimates taxpayers remain exposed to another $38.6 billion to $44.3 billion in liabilities, depending largely on how long existing reactors continue operating.

DOE recorded another $1.12 billion in Judgment Fund payments related to spent fuel during fiscal 2025 alone.

That growing liability is one reason federal officials are attempting to find somewhere to move the 90,000-plus metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel currently stored around the country. Roughly 2,000 additional metric tons are generated each year.

At a Sept. 15 congressional hearing devoted to the campus initiative, Assistant Energy Secretary Theodore Garrish said DOE wants to move beyond informal agreements with states toward enforceable arrangements.

“The thing I want to avoid is handshakes and MOUs,” Garrish said during the hearing, according to an account by the American Nuclear Society. DOE is seeking more formal host agreements by the end of September, followed by a contractual framework later this year.

The waste component remains one of the most complicated parts of the proposal.

Existing federal law does not give DOE a free hand to establish multiple new permanent repositories. Congressional action would be required to substantially change the country’s current nuclear waste framework, a point lawmakers have emphasized during hearings this month.

DOE’s original solicitation nevertheless explicitly asked states to identify what funding arrangements, federal partnerships, incentives and risk-sharing mechanisms would be needed to make a campus viable.

That means Louisiana’s agreement could ultimately determine not only where nuclear material is handled, but how infrastructure costs and financial risks are divided among private companies, the state and federal taxpayers.

Federal officials have pitched the campuses as enormous economic development projects. DOE has said they could attract major private investment, advanced manufacturing and thousands of jobs while building a domestic nuclear-fuel supply chain.

Louisiana has increasingly pursued that industry under Gov. Jeff Landry, whose administration has identified nuclear power, fuel processing and nuclear manufacturing as state economic development priorities.

But Wednesday’s deadline arrives before Congress has resolved some of the most fundamental questions surrounding the program — including how permanent nuclear-waste disposal would be authorized and financed.

For Louisiana, that means the state could soon submit the framework for hosting a project whose eventual scale, federal funding and legal authority remain partly unsettled.