The department is “not meeting the current pit manufacturing schedule,” said a former DOE official who is familiar with the department’s plutonium reserves. “So to make pit plutonium available would be a huge shift, and I’d be shocked.”
Both the current and former officials were granted anonymity to share sensitive details about national security matters.
Trump didn’t mention the pits in a May executive order in which he directed DOE to draw from another source — its stores of surplus plutonium — to help revive the nuclear power industry and meet the soaring electricity demands of data centers used in artificial intelligence. The U.S. stopped making weapons-grade plutonium in 1992.
The department declined to confirm or deny any details of its plutonium plans in response to questions from POLITICO.
“The Department of Energy is evaluating a variety of strategies to build and strengthen domestic supply chains for nuclear fuel, including plutonium, as directed by President Trump’s Executive Orders,” the department said in a statement. “We have no announcements to share at this time.”
The White House referred POLITICO’s questions about the plutonium plans to DOE. The Defense Department referred questions to the White House.
Government watchdogs and congressional Democrats have spent weeks objecting to the entire notion of transferring government-owned plutonium to the power sector. Such a move “goes against long-standing, bipartisan U.S. nuclear security policy,” Democratic Sen. Ed Markey and Reps. Don Beyer and John Garamendi wrote in a Sept. 10 letter to Trump. “It raises serious weapons proliferation concerns, makes little economic sense, and may adversely affect the nation’s defense posture.”
In a separate Sept. 23 letter to Trump, Markey said he was concerned that Energy Secretary Chris Wright was pushing the plutonium proposals to help a Californian nuclear power startup named Oklo, on whose board Wright once sat.
DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said Wright has complied with ethics and financial disclosure requirements, divested assets and resigned from “board positions that may appear to present a conflict of interest.” He said Wright resigned from the Oklo board upon becoming DOE secretary, adding that Wright “has never and does not currently own any financial stake in Oklo.”
Oklo spokesperson Paul Day declined to comment on Markey’s concerns of a possible conflict of interest. He also declined to comment on how much plutonium the company intends or has agreed to acquire from DOE. He said DOE “has not, as far as we know, established a plutonium fuel program.”
One nuclear safety watchdog echoed many of the Democrats’ concerns in an interview, saying DOE’s proposal could hollow out the nation’s nuclear defenses and compromise the Pentagon’s long-term deterrence strategy. And it appears to be happening without coordination with the Defense Department, said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit group that focuses on global security.
“This is mainly a Department of Energy plan that is closely happening in collusion, essentially, with the nuclear power industry,” Kristensen said. “Some of the people that are involved in these recommendations are people that have very close ties to the nuclear power industry.”
DOE through its National Nuclear Security Administration is responsible for safeguarding the nuclear weapons supply and is the lead agency for detecting and stopping nuclear proliferation. The Defense Department manages the nuclear arsenal for strategic, military and defense purposes.
The hunt for plutonium
A July 31 DOE memo seen by POLITICO and prepared by Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly recommends delivering 25 metric tons of plutonium from U.S. government-held stockpiles to the nuclear power industry. More than one-fifth of that material would need to come from pits that the Defense Department relies upon for nuclear deterrence and national security, according to the current DOE official.
Reviving nuclear power is a central tenet of the Trump administration’s energy policy, driven in part by the need to generate rising amounts of electricity for artificial intelligence. Some tech companies are also eager to find carbon-free electricity sources, such as nuclear power, that meet their pledges for reducing greenhouse gas pollution.
U.S. civilian reactors now use only uranium for their nuclear fuel, but some reactors under development are planning to use plutonium. Spent plutonium from reactors is far more radioactive than uranium — and could pose a greater security risk than uranium if it were to fall into the hands of hostile nations or terrorist groups.
Several pilot programs for new kinds of nuclear reactors are underway, with hopes of achieving a sustained chain nuclear reaction next summer. One of Trump’s May orders called for revitalizing the nuclear power industry by supplying commercial power producers with reprocessed spent plutonium from DOE-managed stockpiles.
DOE has committed an initial 20 metric tons of plutonium for civilian use, Democrats noted in the Sept. 10 letter. But the internal July 31 memo showed the department has envisioned a larger goal.
The DOE memo called for delivering 18.5 metric tons of the government’s surplus plutonium and an additional 6.5 metric tons pulled from “material in classified form once it has been declassified.” That latter term, the current DOE official who spoke to POLITICO said, refers to the plutonium pits, whose shape and characteristics can reveal information about nuclear weapons.
The company where Wright was once a board member, Oklo, wants to take advantage of the plutonium fuel program. Unlike its competitors, Oklo’s fast-neutron reactors can use plutonium as a “bridge” fuel to get around the bottlenecks that exist in obtaining the more desirable grades of uranium, CEO Jacob DeWitte told POLITICO in an interview.
DeWitte said Oklo has not publicly revealed how much plutonium the company is seeking to run its new reactors, or from where precisely it plans to obtain that plutonium. He also said the Trump administration has not detailed exactly how much plutonium it will make available, noting that “there is disagreement” over how much surplus plutonium the federal government can hand off before harming nuclear deterrence.
“We’re waiting to see more, too,” he said. “It’s a worthwhile thing. But again, it depends on some details. And there’s going to be some details that we’re just not going to see.”
Adrienne Schweer, Oklo’s head of government relations, said she does not believe that the company’s history with Wright factored into Trump administration decisions, noting Wright has touted all sorts of nuclear power from his perch at DOE.
“Secretary Wright is really knowledgeable on nuclear and energy broadly,” she said in an interview. “I don’t imagine that he would ever play favorites. He’s not that kind of guy.”
Oklo is one of several companies that has pushed for more nuclear fuel supply, though it is one of the most public about its willingness and ability to use plutonium.
Oklo hired lobbying firm Holland & Knight in March to press on “nuclear and plutonium recyclability and access to feedstock,” among other issues. On Aug. 11, it signed a memorandum of understanding with nuclear fuel developer Lightbridge Corp. to develop plutonium-based reactor fuel for its reactors. Oklo also inked a partnership in June with the Air Force to build a pilot reactor in Alaska that would use refined weapons-grade plutonium. “
Oklo officials Mark Senderling and Ed Petit de Mange met with senior DOE officials on July 31, according to an internal DOE calendar obtained by POLITICO. The same day, the department partnered with the Nuclear Energy Institute and the United States Nuclear Industry Council for a “Fuel Industry Day” event at NEI’s Washington office to allow DOE “to engage directly with industry participants about potentially utilizing certain materials as a source of nuclear fuel,” according to a schedule of the event.
An Oklo official confirmed the company participated in the July 31 event. The Oklo official said its understanding was that the administration intended to commit only “surplus” plutonium for industry use.
“This is not interference with the weapons programs, at least from what I understand,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. “This is the extra stuff that we were supposed to bury in the ground.”
‘No way to do that easily’
Congress has ordered DOE to produce 80 new pits annually by 2030 to modernize the nation’s weapons stockpile. For now, the Defense Department relies on 20,000 plutonium pits stored at DOE’s Pantex facility in Texas for its Minuteman III missiles.
The July 31 memo alluded to those needs in asking DOE to craft “a strategic plan to improve pit disassembly throughput without negatively impacting pit assembly.”
But new pits are slow coming. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation’s only plutonium pit producer, made just one last year. A second facility, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, is under construction but won’t be finished until 2032.
It takes several months to make each pit, which is then placed into larger warheads for modern Sentinel missiles. The Sentinel program is over budget and being restructured, so new missiles are not expected to be completed for years.
The DOE plans have drawn concern from congressional Democrats such as Markey, Garamendi and Beyer, who questioned the wisdom of giving away plutonium at the same time that the government is trying to replenish its pits.
“[W]e are concerned that your plan would give away plutonium that could otherwise help to maintain the nuclear arsenal,” they wrote in the Sept. 10 letter. “We should not disassemble existing pits that might reduce the need to produce new ones in the future.”
DOE has struggled to gather enough excess plutonium stored at sites around the country to meet Trump’s goals, according to a July 25 email obtained by POLITICO. The message revealed increasing urgency to deliver on its commitment to provide plutonium to the power industry that may conflict with national defense capabilities.
Danly asked DOE to tally up how much plutonium it oversees to develop a plan for shipping it to the industry, Chimi Zacot, a senior adviser for nuclear security at the department, wrote in the email to several officials there. The goal, Zacot said, was to figure out how much plutonium it could offer industry while maintaining an adequate stockpile for defense and national security.
Zacot wrote that Danly was displeased with how much plutonium the agency said it needed to withhold for the weapons stockpile. Zacot asked what the agency could do to expedite disassembly of plutonium pits to ship the material to industry.
Zacot did not respond to a request from POLITICO for comment.
Danly dialed up the pressure in an Aug. 11 memo to John Dupuy, director of DOE’s office of enterprise assessments, and Teresa Robbins of the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. That memo called for evaluating the department leadership that oversees plutonium pits.
Despite the administration’s urgency, it would take years to break down pits and refine the plutonium for civilian use, said Stephen Young, associate director of government affairs at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science watchdog group. DOE tried to convert weapons grade plutonium into commercial fuel at its Savannah River site before abandoning the project in 2018 due to costs.
“There’s no way to do that easily. Plutonium has to be put into fuel in a process that I don’t think they have figured out quite yet,” he said. “It’s not a near-term thing that’s going to happen.”
Source: Politico
