By John LaForge
White House appointees have offered excess plutonium from retired nuclear warheads, now stored in Texas to private industry at no cost for potential use as fuel in commercial power reactors.
“A July 31, 2025 memo seen by Politico from the Department of Energy (DOE), prepared by Deputy Secretary James Danly, recommends delivering 25 metric tons of plutonium from U.S. government-held stockpiles to the nuclear power industry,” Politico reported September 29.
“More than 20% of the material would come from plutonium pits — the highly radioactive spheres manufactured for the cores of nuclear weapons,” Politico said.
Due to cost and availability, uranium for reactor fuel is increasingly hard to secure. The plutonium scheme is essentially a bail-out for a failing industry. Hans Kristensen, with the Federation of American Scientists, told Politico that the plan represents “collusion, essentially, with the nuclear power industry. Some of the people that are involved in these recommendations are people that have very close ties to the nuclear power industry.” It would take companies at least several years to convert the plutonium into fuel. In 2018, a similar effort attempted at Savannah River plant in South Carolina failed and was cancelled by the first Trump White House because of a $50 billion price tag.
“It would be incredibly dangerous, complicated, and expensive to convert these impure plutonium materials into fuel that is safe enough for use in reactors,” said Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The government’s former plutonium production reactors and weapons fashioning facilities all across the country are burdened with thousands of tons of highly radioactive military wastes that must be contained and kept out of the environment for eons. (The long-term containment of 90,000 tons of civilian high-level radioactive waste from commercial power reactors are a separate, unsolved problem being mulled over by federal regulators.)
Military cesium-137 left from plutonium production at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state has been collected there for 75 years. There are reportedly 1,335 highly radioactive capsules of cesium-137 at Hanford. Approximately 700,000 tons of waste uranium-238, or “depleted uranium,” is stored in huge tanks in Paducah, Kentucky and Portsmouth, Ohio.
Roughly 50 tons of excess plutonium from weapons is stored at the Pantex Plant in Texas. As of 2021, a total of 61.2 tons of plutonium was called “excess to the needs of the U.S. government,” of which 53.4 tons is designated for nuclear weapons,” according to Robert Alvarez in the March 8, 2021 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The Energy Department faces the daunting task of geologically disposing of this huge cache of weapons-grade plutonium…,” he said.
The cost of keeping these deadly, cancer-causing radioactive wastes contained over thousands of years is so enormous, that at various times the government has proposed civilian “re-use” of the hot waste.
Cesium-137 is offered to “irradiation” operators for the irradiation of medical equipment in need of sterilization and for “food irradiation” conducted on spices, tea, and some fruits and vegetables. Uranium-238 is given away free to weapons producers who make armor-piercing, so-called “depleted uranium” munitions.
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