The Trump administration is working on a deal to give weapons-grade plutonium to energy companies

By Ella Nilsen, CNN

(CNN) — For years, the federal government has been working on turning old, unexploded warheads left over from the Cold War into a fuel for next-generation nuclear power plants. Now, a significant new deal in the works could allow five private companies to access weapons-grade plutonium for the first time — and convert it into electricity.

The Energy Department announced Tuesday it had selected advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc, as well as four other companies, to begin “advanced negotiations” over whether the companies could access its Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program, according to a spokesperson for the department’s office of Nuclear Energy. The negotiations aren’t yet finalized.

DOE’s program could “help companies unlock the next level of private funding to broaden domestic nuclear fuel supplies, spur innovation on American recycling technologies, and unlock private sector funding to fuel the nation’s nuclear renaissance,” principal deputy assistant secretary of nuclear energy Mike Goff said in a statement.

A potential plutonium deal with the Trump administration, if successful, could be a major step forward for advanced nuclear companies building small modular reactors, which are racing to obtain fuel for their power-making operations. But it could also spur concerns about nuclear proliferation, and the US cracking the door open for other countries to do the same.

“The transfer of weapons-usable plutonium to private industry would increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, including to rogue states or terrorists,” a September letter from Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia and John Garamendi of California reads. “The United States cannot effectively discourage other countries from using plutonium for civil purposes if we use it ourselves.”

Small modular nuclear reactors require less upkeep and physical space than the existing fleet of hulking and aging nuclear power plants in the US. Some advanced nuclear companies are backed by big tech; there’s a huge demand for their future power, as artificial intelligence greatly increases US electricity demand.

However, their current bottleneck is fuel.

Advanced nuclear reactors require a more energy-dense and highly-enriched uranium compared to conventional reactors. And until Russia launched its war with Ukraine in 2022, it had been the primary supplier of enriched uranium to the US.

Companies like Oklo see US plutonium stockpiles as a key ingredient to getting next-generation reactors fueled quickly, while other domestic enrichment capabilities in the US work to scale up. Oklo has been working with the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — the original site of the Manhattan Project — to run experiments testing its reactor technology.

“Fuel supply constraints are a key throttle to advanced reactor development,” said Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte in a statement. DeWitte said the DOE program could “create a pathway” to use extra plutonium “as bridge fuel for advanced reactors to bring more reactors online sooner.”

In addition to Oklo, DOE selected companies Exodys Energy, SHINE, Standard Nuclear and Flibe Energy to enter into advanced negotiations on its plutonium program.

Prior to pursuing a strategy of repurposing old plutonium for nuclear power fuel, the Biden administration’s Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration had been pursuing a different strategy — seeking to dilute and bury the plutonium deep underground in New Mexico.

But across both the Biden and Trump administrations, scientists and energy officials have been seeking ways to transform various parts of US nuclear stockpile into energy. At NNSA facilities, nuclear scientists have been making advanced reactor fuel — a process that creates a molten soup of weapons-grade uranium combined with low-enriched uranium, all mixed in a massive, metal cauldron heated to around 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

In addition to this federal program, various private companies in the US are working to rebuild uranium enrichment capabilities.

In a 2024 interview with CNN, Goff described the search within DOE for suitable nuclear fuel for advanced reactors as a “couch cushion exercise,” in other words, looking high and low for anything that could get companies fuel more quickly.

“Fuel access is one of the hardest problems in the advanced reactor industry right now, and it’s a problem of chemistry and infrastructure as much as policy,” said Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of SHINE, one of the companies selected by DOE, which specializes in recycling used nuclear fuel. “Turning surplus material that’s been sitting in storage into fuel for the next generation of reactors is exactly the kind of problem we built SHINE to solve.”

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