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In March 2017, Donald Trump’s budget proposal included 120 million dollars to resume the controversial Yucca Mountain project in Nevada for the burial of high-level radioactive waste, which had originally been greenlit by George W. Bush in 2002 and then aborted by Barack Obama in 2009. Although the political oscillation seems to suggest partisan polarization between Democrats and Republicans on this prickly issue, the forty years of intense debate since the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act attest to the complexity, beyond partisanship, of a problem with which all nations using nuclear power are confronted. This article addresses how US federalism and eroded trust in both government and expert decision-making can account for the more specific reasons behind this global deadlock.