US officials spark backlash with controversial plans for Cold War-era plutonium: 'Dangerous'

An executive order signed in May of this year aims to make 20 metric tons of Cold War-era plutonium available to U.S. power companies to be used as potential fuel for nuclear reactors, a Reuters exclusive report revealed.

This action would also serve to halt existing programs to dilute and dispose of surplus plutonium, such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico that's been receiving waste since 1999.  

Nuclear waste recycling efforts are nothing new, but the U.S. has failed to make much headway in that sector. 

One West Valley, New York, facility processed only 640 metric tons between 1966 and 1972. Two others were built in the '70s but never went into operation, with one being declared inoperable due to fundamental design flaws, according to Powermag. 

In 1977, the Carter administration deferred the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium from the U.S. nuclear program, citing weapons proliferation concerns at the time.

However, in the U.K., the Sellafield Magnox plant successfully processed spent nuclear fuel and repurposed it until it closed in 2022, having completed its mission after 58 years of cleaning up nuclear waste while providing fuel for emissions-free energy.

The La Hague plant in France continues its work on reprocessing plutonium and uranium for reuse in mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which many advanced reactor designs are well-suited to use. 

"We've recycled over 40,000 metric tons overall at La Hague, which is less than half of the amount we have stored here in the U.S.," Sven Bader, a technical consultant and nuclear expert from Orano, the plant's owner, told Powermag.

Since the 1950s, the U.S. has produced 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel through the operation of nuclear plants, which generate nearly a fifth of the country's electricity.

In 2024, U.S. nuclear power plants generated nearly 782 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is enough to power more than 72 million homes. They've helped avoid more than 400 million metric tons of CO2 that power plants running on dirty fuels would have generated. 

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The Department of Energy has said that more than 90% of the potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor, which means that the U.S. has been overlooking an important resource.

Interestingly, the first Trump administration canceled the contract for a MOX project in 2018, citing its more than $50 billion price tag, according to Reuters. In contrast, the WIPP program would cost just $20 billion to complete its safe storage mission.

Now that the administration wants to restart the long-stalled domestic program, some critics have concerns that history will get repeated — but the advent of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency have each strained power grids such that it is understandable to see countries looking back to nuclear for solutions, particularly when compared to the more problematic coal and other fossil fuels.

Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydro, wave, and geothermal each offer better "bang for buck" and faster pathways to harnessing their power than both nuclear and fossil fuels, while also being less polluting, though a litany of factors has stalled adoption in the current political climate. In the aftermath, the re-evaluation of nuclear has emerged since it can at least offer a powerful surge of electricity generation in a relatively small footprint once built. Yet some experts have doubts about the plan to leverage this old plutonium within nuclear's re-evaluation.  

"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, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters.

"The excess plutonium is a dangerous waste product and DOE should stick to the safer, more secure, and far cheaper plan to dilute and directly dispose of it in WIPP."

While that perspective would theoretically take some potential energy generation off the board, the point Lyman and others have made is that the time and cost it takes to properly implement new nuclear power generation goes beyond what renewable options can provide with adequate buy-in and planning, since years can pass in the meantime relying on fuels that cause further carbon and other greenhouse gases to enter the atmosphere, along with the containment risks inherent to nuclear itself. 

Amory Lovins, chairman emeritus at the Rocky Mountain Institute, has also previously pushed against the notion of turning to nuclear, particularly more risky new applications of it, when safer and faster renewable options exist: "The more urgent climate change is, the more we must invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to buy cheap, fast, sure options instead of costly, slow, speculative ones," he wrote in 2021. "Only this strategy saves the most carbon per dollar and per year. Anything else worsens climate change."

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