Trump administration eyes plutonium handoff to five nuclear startups

The Trump administration is moving to turn one of the federal government’s most dangerous liabilities into a commercial fuel source, a gamble that puts 34 tons of surplus plutonium at the center of a fight over energy policy, nuclear security and taxpayer risk. The Energy Department has selected five startups, Oklo, Standard Nuclear, Shine Technologies, Flibe Energy and Exodys Energy, to enter negotiations over access to part of the material.

The proposal collides with a longstanding federal disposition plan that has treated the stockpile as waste, not feedstock. The department’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program says the preferred approach is to dilute and dispose of up to 34 metric tons of plutonium surplus to defense needs, with environmental documents naming the Pantex Plant in Texas, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico as part of the infrastructure tied to that work.

Instead, the administration is asking whether private companies can use the material to help seed a new reactor industry. Some of the selected startups are pursuing designs that could run on plutonium directly or on mixed oxide fuel, known as MOX, which blends uranium and plutonium. Oklo has said its plutonium-fueled fast reactor project, Pluto, is under the department’s Reactor Pilot Program and has been supported by fast-spectrum plutonium criticality work with Los Alamos National Laboratory. Exodys Energy says it is focused on modular, proliferation-resistant reprocessing, while Flibe Energy is developing liquid-fueled reactor concepts.

The policy push is part of a broader acceleration campaign. The Energy Department launched the Reactor Pilot Program on July 16, 2025, and said it wants at least three advanced reactor concepts outside the national laboratories to reach criticality by July 4, 2026. It also initially selected 11 advanced reactor projects and later named Oklo, Terrestrial Energy, TRISO-X and Valar Atomics for its fuel line pilot program. Standard Nuclear was separately chosen as the first company accepted into that program.

The effort has already drawn warnings from Capitol Hill. In September 2025, Sen. Edward Markey and Reps. John Garamendi and Don Beyer said transferring at least 20 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium to private industry would be enough for roughly 2,000 nuclear bombs. The Nuclear Threat Initiative says civilian stockpiles of separated plutonium already total 371 metric tons worldwide, enough for at least 46,000 nuclear weapons. Heather Williams of the group has argued that other countries have tried similar approaches and concluded the material was too much of a liability to keep in civilian systems.

The governance questions are sharpened by personnel ties. Chris Wright, now the 17th U.S. secretary of energy, previously served on Oklo’s board before joining the administration and said he had divested his shares. Sam Altman also served as Oklo’s board chair after its merger with his acquisition company before stepping down last year. That overlap only intensifies scrutiny of whether Washington is building a new fuel industry, or underwriting a high-risk experiment with some of the most sensitive material in the federal inventory.