President Donald Trump has a plan for U.S. energy that’s straight from “Back to the Future” — and it’s pretty clever.
The Trump administration is preparing to use 20 metric tons of Cold War-era plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads as reactor fuel by U.S. power companies, marking the first significant effort to integrate weapons-grade plutonium into the American energy market.
The Department of Energy plans to announce within days that it will seek proposals from industry to convert the radioactive material into nuclear fuel, according to a source familiar with the matter and a draft policy memo obtained by Reuters. The plan follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in May directing federal agencies to halt much of the existing program to dilute and dispose of surplus plutonium.
The plutonium would be offered to companies at little or no cost, but utilities would assume full financial responsibility for transporting the dangerous material and building, operating, and eventually decommissioning government-approved facilities to process it into reactor-ready fuel.
The 20 metric tons represent a portion of a 34-metric-ton stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium that the United States pledged to eliminate under a 2000 non-proliferation agreement with Russia. The material is currently stored at heavily guarded weapons facilities including the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Pantex Plant in Texas, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years and requires strict safety protocols and specialized equipment for handling. While plutonium has previously been tested in commercial reactors only on a limited basis, the Trump administration sees the material as potential fuel for advanced nuclear technologies.
The Department of Energy declined to confirm the draft plan but said it is “evaluating a variety of strategies to build and strengthen domestic supply chains for nuclear fuel, including plutonium,” in line with Trump’s directive.
The policy shift comes as the administration seeks to bolster the domestic energy sector amid rising electricity demand. Power consumption is climbing for the first time in two decades, driven largely by the surge in data centers needed for artificial intelligence technologies.
However, the plan has drawn sharp criticism from nuclear safety experts who point to the failure of a similar previous effort. Under the 2000 agreement with Russia, the plutonium was initially planned to be converted to mixed oxide fuel, or MOX, to run in nuclear power plants. The Trump administration killed that contract in 2018 after costs were expected to exceed $50 billion.
Until Trump’s May order, the U.S. disposal strategy involved blending the plutonium with inert materials and burying it at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground repository in New Mexico. The Energy Department has estimated that burying the plutonium would cost around $20 billion.
The Trump administration’s approach represents a dramatic shift from disposal to utilization, betting that private industry can succeed where previous government efforts failed. The plan would require companies to design, build, and operate specialized facilities capable of safely handling weapons-grade plutonium and converting it into commercially viable reactor fuel.
Critics argue this approach ignores the lessons learned from the costly MOX program failure. The previous effort was abandoned not only due to ballooning costs but also technical challenges in safely processing weapons-grade plutonium for commercial use.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would need to approve any facilities designed to process weapons-grade plutonium, a process that could take a long time and require serious safety reviews.