The Great Plutonium Heist
I thought they had looted everything possible from the US, but I was wrong. Now they are stripping the plutonium plumbing from the decaying tenement that is America.
Plutonium was literally created in government run nuclear reactors, processed in government run reprocessing plants that required environmental cleanup that is still ongoing today, stored in military depots, and protected against theft by strict security. The US taxpayers paid for all this as part of the Cold War.
Nuclear power in general has faced massive and increasing cost overruns and delays, and that is with systems whose basic design hasn’t changed in fifty years. The waste management problem has never been solved in the US. (Russia claims a closed cycle system that burns the waste.)
The cheapest energy today is solar and wind, but that isn’t good enough for the tech bros and their plan to build the Forbin Project. So, a bunch of fast-talking startups, heavily financed by and lobbied for by the usual megalomaniacs in Silicon Valley, have convinced Trump, on the basis of no evidence, that its time to massively rollout several unproven nuclear reactor technologies. Oh, and BTW, they would like the government to simply give them the US stockpile of weapons grade plutonium (WPu) for free. After all, that’s just “surplus waste”.
The Five Elephants of the Apocalypse
1. The Privatization Giveaway
The biggest elephant in the room here is the market price of WPu (for which there actually is no market, because only states have it). The news stories mention how much plutonium - either 34 metric tons (37.47 tons), which is the total stockpile, or 20 tons, which may be the amount proposed to be given away. But no one mentions how much the plutonium is worth. That’s because WPu is worth at minimum, $10,000 per GRAM. That’s $10M dollars per kilogram, or $10B dollars per metric ton.
So, 34 metric tons is worth at least $340 B; twenty metric tons is worth $200 B . And they just want the government to “dispose” of this “waste” to them for free. It is an obscene looting of the public treasury.
2. The Security Nightmare
The second biggest elephant is the issue around securing the plutonium. The material recovered from disassembling the weapons is in the form of small hollow spheres that are three to four inches in diameter. They are called pits because they remind people of peach pits. If you didn’t mind dying of radiation poisoning, you could pop one in the pocket of your cargo shorts; and no one would notice. The spheres weigh about 6 kilograms. So a ton of Pu-239 would be about 666 pits. Sorry about the End Times resonance, but that’s just how the numbers come out.
Imagine how easy it would be to make a fake pit and swap one out as you transferred hundreds of them at a time. That’s why the military security around WPu is massive and redundant.
Do you think the grifters running this shitshow will do security anywhere near as well? They can’t bring in military security because it gives away the grift: the taxpayers would be subsidizing the companies with security on top of the WPu giveaway. Worst case: do you wonder if some of these congenital crooks might sell some of this stuff on the black market for a huge pay day? Even worse case, suppose the craziest tech bro, Alex Karp, got his hands on a pit. You would have a nuclear armed corporation headed by a fascist lunatic.
3. Goodbye to the Non-Proliferation Treaty
The third elephant is the destruction of the nuclear non-proliferation agreement. The US has been beating up Iran for having enriched uranium for forty years. And now they decide its fine to give WPu to private companies with little track record in nuclear security. The double standard couldn’t get any bigger. They just handed Iran a club to beat us with. They just gave a green light to every tinpot dictator to acquire nuclear tech.
nuclear waste recycling unnerves some nuclear nonproliferation experts. Starting in the 1970s, the United States sought to discourage other countries from reprocessing nuclear waste over concerns that it would create significant amounts of plutonium that could be diverted into weapons programs. New efforts to turn plutonium into fuel could break that longstanding taboo, critics say.
- Brad Plumer, NY Times, U.S. Seeks to GiveWeapons- Grade Plutonium to Start-Ups for Fuel (May 26, 2026)
4. The Technical Challenge
The fourth elephant is the technical difficulty of molten salt reactors (MSRs). MSRs are the focus of four out of the five chosen companies. OKLO, Exodys, and Filbe are developing MSRs. Standard Nuclear is developing TRISO [NOTE] fuel for MSRs.
While molten salt technology has been around since the 1970s, it was mothballed because countries wanted uranium reactors to produce plutonium. The technology was considered so irrelevant to US national security that the research was published for the world to see. The Chinese picked up that research and, with typical Chinese discipline, just demonstrated the first live refueling ever of a thorium (not plutonium) reactor. That reactor only produces two megawatts, but they have already started to build a 100 megawatt reactor. They could be at gigawatt scale in five years.
I don’t want to rain on PCAST’s parade, but do they really think this ad hoc collection of small to tiny companies is going to even make MSRs work at scale? And, even if they did, what would happen when the Chinese offer the tech bros MSRs that work better and cost way less? Maybe this is just a short term long con: the tech bros get paid biggly to try, inevitably fail, and buy Chinese. Do you think the tech bros have the slightest loyalty to the US?
5. Massive Conflict of Interest
The fifth elephant is the conflict of interest of the PCAST team. There are over 50 companies in the nuclear reactor/fuel space [NOTE 3], and PCAST arbitrarily, and with no public discussion or explanation, picked five of them. (SHINE is different than the other four. See the APPENDIX.) As for the other four:
OKLO
It just happens (:sarcasm:) that the director of the DOE which runs PCAST, used to be on the board of OKLO; and Scam Altman (also PCAST) used to be the board chairman. Three of OKLO’s directors used to work for DOE. The CEO and the COO sold, respectively, $35M and $25M of stock since January 1st, cashing in on the creation of PCAST.
Also on the board is David Park, president of Koch Strategic Partners. Praise be, he’s not a tech bro. He merely works for the most odious, most deep pocketed, reactionary family in the country. BTW, the Kochs were early investors in SHINE. They are double dipping this radioactive gravy train.
Standard Nuclear
It just happens (:sarcasm:) that Marc Andreseen’s VC firm, Andressen Horowitz, is a lead investor in Standard Nuclear. Standard itself was the obsession of a former CIA officer who went bankrupt trying to make TRISO work whereupon, in October 2024 Andressen snapped them up.
Filbe and Exodys
Then we get down to the two bit players, wannabe entrepreneurs with a slide deck bigger than their resources. Its a fight between Filbe and Exodys for who is the smallest.
Filbe Energy has received some DOE and ARPA grants, but you can’t tell how much, because the company has no board of directors and no publicly disclosed commercial customers. They wave their hands about molten salt. That’s all we know.
Exodys is a rebrand of a company called Elysium Industries. Elysium existed for eight years, trying to perfect an MSR. They never built anything. They closed down in 2022, and their intellectual property was transferred to Exodys. Exodys has disclosed total funding of $2.5M. Tracxn ranks them 21st out of 59 companies in the field. Hardly a glowing recommendation.
Why are these two sketchy, under-capitalized companies in the starting lineup for the major technological push of a dangerous technology? Can you say “friend of Scam/Marc”?
Bond (i) is Back
The final shovelful of elephant poop from PCAST is the appointment of Pam Bondi. Bondi has no science background. No engineering background. No AI background. No nuclear background. Bondi was appointed to PCAST without a press release or a formal announcement. The silent appointment was buried by the hoopla over the Texas senate primary.
It had to be buried. As Attorney General, Bondi okayed the “gift” of that Qatari jet to Trump. She has been a registered foreign agent of Qatar. The Qataris, like the UAE, are massively invested in the AI space. Nothing to see here. No conflict of interest. No sir. We need red blooded agents of foreign governments sitting on our most strategic project.
The Big Picture
While MSRs, especially those fueled by thorium, have great potential; they are not yet commercial. There could be scale-up problems. Although the nuclear waste issue will be less for thorium, it has never been solved for uranium, and using WPu will create massive amounts of toxic waste. The only solution for waste that has been proposed for TRISO is burial in geological faults. [NOTE 2] That has been a non-starter for forty years. See Yucca Mountain.
Seeing the big picture on PCAST is yet another demonstration that the US is no longer a democracy. Our foreign policy is dictated to us by Israel. Our domestic policy is dictated by the tech bros, and their wholly owned subsidiary, the government agency PCAST. The Congress critters, not to mention the “voters”, aren’t even offered an opportunity to comment. Policies just appear from one Fuhrer Directive, Executive Order, after another. Expect more corrupt, unsafe policies to emanate from this nexus of hubris and greed.
APPENDIX
SHINE is on a completely different track technically than the other four. SHIINE uses a linear accelerator to create massive amounts of neutrons via a deuterium/tritium fusion. They use the neutrons to create medical isotopes, some of the isotopes come from uranium irradiated by the SHINE accelerator. Compared to power reactors, the scale of SHINE is tiny. AFAIK, SHINE has done nothing with Plutonium or molten salt. So let’s set aside SHINE.
NOTE
TRISO fuel is sometimes called pebbles. Reactors using TRISO are called “pebble bed” reactors. The fuel is small spheres of uranium coated in such a way as to prevent a meltdown if cooling should fail. As temperature rises, the pebble expands, thereby reducing the density of the fuel and stopping the nuclear reaction. The problem is that “burning” TRISO still produces radioactive waste, only now it has ten times the volume.
A major drawback of the TRISO-based reactors is they typically discharge the largest volume of SNF in the industry, approximately 10-16 times more than more traditional light water reactors per unit of energy produced. This situation creates both short and long-term storage challenges. [NOTE 2]
https://www.srnl.gov/srnl_news/new-technology-solves-unique-spent-nuclear-fuel-storage-issues/
NOTE 2
Recent research at Savannah River National Labs (SRNL) has ameliorated the volume problem, but the only long-term solution to the waste is burying it. Nothing new, nothing compelling about that.
SRNL’s patented process can reduce the volume of the TRISO SNF by a factor of 20 by removing the graphite binder in which the small particles of fuel are dispersed, without damaging the particles of fuel. After removal, the fuel kernels can go into short-term interim storage in a repository. For long term storage and disposal, the fuel will need to be further immobilized.
https://www.srnl.gov/srnl_news/new-technology-solves-unique-spent-nuclear-fuel-storage-issues/
NOTE 3
The company data for Exodys mentions the number of companies in this field.
EXODYS ENERGY is a seed company based in New York City (United States), founded in 2022. It operates as a Developer of closed-loop and circular nuclear systems to recycle nuclear waste into clean energy. EXODYS ENERGY has raised $2.37M in funding. The company has 56 active competitors, including 19 funded and 4 that have exited. Its top competitors include companies like NuScale Power, Newcleo and TerraPower.
Company Details
Founded Year 2022
Location New York City
Stage Seed
Total Funding $2.37M in 1 round
Latest Funding Round Seed, Jun 13, 2024, $*****
Ranked 21st among 56 active competitors
- Tracxn, Exodys Energy - Company Profile