By Linda Pentz Gunter
Edited by Nukewatch Staff for space
In yet another alarming development coming from the White House, private corporations proposing risky, untested startup reactors are to be given access to plutonium, the most toxic material known to science and the fore trigger in nuclear bombs.
A May 27 exposé in The New York Times revealed that the Trump administration is proposing to allow private entities access to Cold War-era leftover plutonium in order to convert it into fuel for risky new reactor designs that have yet to pass any kind of rigorous safety analysis.
The move marks a dangerous commercialization of plutonium and would treat plutonium like a commodity with value, instead of as a long-lived lethal waste. One of the first companies to benefit is Oklo, on whose board the current Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, used to sit and whose stock rose on the announcement.
The other companies involved, according to reporting in The Times, are Standard Nuclear, Exodys Energy, SHINE Technologies, and Flibe Energy. The plutonium would come from a surplus stockpile of dismantled nuclear warheads. Previous efforts to use plutonium as reactor fuel [in South Carolina] collapsed due to extreme expense and technical challenges.
Oklo, and its European partner, Newcleo — a nuclear “innovation” company registered in France — claim they can produce reactor fuel from surplus plutonium faster than waiting for new fuel production to get up and running in the United States. This, argues Ed Lyman, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, is simply nonsense.
“The idea that plutonium could actually be used more quickly than uranium fuel is absurd because of the complexity, and the attention to safety and security that a plutonium fuel facility would require,” Lyman said, speaking during a recent Capitol Hill briefing on the risks and unaffordability of new nuclear projects.
Given its sole use as the key component of thermonuclear bombs, any use of plutonium, especially in the private sector, would require extreme security measures. Placing plutonium material in the hands of private multinational corporations not only sets a dangerous precedent but, “raises serious weapons proliferation concerns, makes little economic sense, and may adversely affect the nation’s defense posture,” wrote three Democratic members of Congress — Don Beyer of Virginia, John Garamendi of California, and Ed Markey of Massachusetts — in a letter last September to the Department of Energy.
“Taking plutonium, surplus plutonium, and handing it to industry for fuel,” said longtime nuclear nonproliferation policy expert Sharon Squassoni, represents an ominous crossover from the civil into the military nuclear sector. “In terms of the military-versus-civilian line blurring, why is that so important? Because if it’s not civilian, you don’t [get] Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulation,” she said during remarks alongside Lyman and others during the Capitol Hill briefing. That is, the new startup reactors will be able to avoid all safety regulations imposed on today’s reactors by the U.S. NRC.
The plan to build a factory to fabricate a fuel blend known as mixed-oxide, or MOX, at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina — using uranium and surplus plutonium — eventually collapsed, partially due to the ever-ballooning price tag, which reached $50 billion before the project was abandoned.
Part of the extreme costs were due to the myriad technical challenges and the fact that … no existing U.S. reactors at the time were designed to do so.
Reprocessing itself is a highly expensive and polluting procedure, resulting in greater volumes of radioactive waste — much of it released into the environment — even as it reduces the levels of radioactivity within the waste. As a result of reprocessing at the Sellafield site in the UK, the Irish Sea is now considered the most radioactive sea in the world, due to the site’s liquid radioactive discharges.
A MOX fuel fabrication facility was under construction at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina for years before being abandoned after wasting $50 billion.
“Trying to convert this material into reactor fuel is insanity. It would entail trying to repeat the disastrous MOX fuel program and hoping for a different result,” Edwin Lyman, told Reuters last August.
More than 20 years ago, the now closed Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), for which Lyman used to work, called out the dangers of using plutonium in the commercial sector.
The NCI warned then of what would become the intolerably high costs of making MOX, writing: “The MOX approach would take decades to complete, require billions of taxpayers dollars in subsidies to electrical utility companies, and promote plutonium fuel industries in other countries.”
“Converting warhead plutonium into fuel for generating electricity would stimulate commerce in this extremely toxic, weapons-usable material,” the institute said, adding, “Fifteen pounds of plutonium is enough for one atomic bomb. A few specks of it inhaled into the lungs cause cancer. Commerce in many tons of plutonium raises risks of theft by terrorists and outlaw states, and of aggravating the consequences of reactor accidents.”
— Linda Pentz Gunter is Executive Director of Beyond Nuclear, writes for Capitol Hill Citizen, edits Beyond Nuclear International, and is the author of No To Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress, and Provokes War (Pluto Press 2026).
