"Enough Plutonium for 2,000 Atomic Bombs": The Trump Administration's Plan to Give Cold War Nuclear Material to Private Companies

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, the United States Department of Energy made an announcement that is simultaneously a nuclear energy policy decision, a nonproliferation controversy, a conflict-of-interest story, and a window into how the Trump administration is approaching the intersection of national security assets and private sector ambition. The department said it had selected five companies to enter advanced negotiations for what it is calling the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program — a plan to transfer weapons-grade plutonium from Cold War-era dismantled nuclear warheads to private companies, who would convert the material into fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors. If finalised, it will mark the first time in American history that weapons-grade plutonium from the US nuclear arsenal has been made available to private industry.

Among the five selected companies is Oklo, the nuclear startup whose co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte sat in the Oval Office one year ago as President Trump signed executive orders on nuclear energy. Oklo's stock rose more than 5.5 percent to $69.51 per share on Tuesday on the news. Oklo has announced it plans to develop the fuel in partnership with newcleo, a European company that aims to build high-technology nuclear reactors using liquid metal-cooled designs. Newcleo's CEO Stefano Buono said using the plutonium as fuel would reduce what he described as US nuclear liabilities — meaning the long-term cost and complexity of managing a stockpile whose radioactive hazard persists for geological timescales. The department has not named the other four companies selected to enter advanced negotiations, though media reports indicate they are among the constellation of nuclear startups and advanced reactor developers that have been lobbying for access to the material for several years.

The material being discussed is not obscure or marginal. The Energy Department holds more than 50 tonnes of surplus plutonium in storage at heavily guarded weapons facilities across three states — South Carolina, Texas, and New Mexico — and the program announced Tuesday involves making available approximately 20 metric tonnes of that total. Plutonium has a half-life of approximately 24,000 years, meaning it requires protective handling and secure containment for a duration that exceeds human civilisation's entire recorded history. The 20 metric tonnes specifically identified for potential transfer is, according to the Energy Department's own characterisations and the calculations of nonproliferation experts who have scrutinised the announcement, sufficient material to manufacture approximately 2,000 atomic bombs.

That last figure — 2,000 bombs — is not a fringe calculation from alarmist critics. It is the number used in the letter that Democratic senators sent to President Trump in September 2025 urging him to cancel the program, and it is the number Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts referenced when he described the plan as equivalent to "selling nuclear weapons at Costco." It is the number that appears in the nonproliferation expert community's consistent and unified assessment of what is being contemplated, and it is the number that makes the conflict between the Energy Department's framing of the plan as a responsible utilisation of a waste liability and its critics' framing as a catastrophic precedent for nuclear security so difficult to resolve through normal policy debate.

To understand the origin of this 20 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium, you have to go back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War. As the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States began reducing its nuclear arsenal under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties negotiated first under President Reagan and then under President George H.W. Bush, both countries found themselves with a growing inventory of dismantled nuclear warheads and no established plan for the enormous quantities of fissile material those warheads contained. The United States and Russia negotiated the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement in 2000, a bilateral arms control commitment in which each country agreed to dispose of 34 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium in ways that would make it permanently unsuitable for weapons use — specifically by converting it into mixed-oxide fuel, known as MOX, blending it with uranium oxide in proportions that render the material unusable in a weapons programme.

The United States built a MOX fabrication facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina specifically to implement this commitment. Construction began in 2007 and proceeded with escalating cost overruns and schedule delays that ultimately made the facility one of the most expensive and troubled nuclear construction projects in American history, with estimates for completion rising from an initial $1.6 billion to more than $17 billion before the Obama administration moved to cancel the project in 2018 in favour of an alternative approach — diluting the plutonium with inert material and disposing of it in deep underground storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had each, in their different ways, treated the MOX and dilute-and-dispose approaches as ways of meeting the arms control commitment while managing the material in accordance with a bipartisan principle that had been American nuclear policy since the 1970s: weapons-grade plutonium should not circulate in civilian commerce.

That principle has a specific historical origin. In the mid-1970s, Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both established formal nonproliferation policies that specifically barred the domestic commercial use of separated plutonium and opposed the spread of plutonium reprocessing technology internationally. The reasoning was explicit: if plutonium is used as a commercial reactor fuel, the technology required to handle, transport, and process it becomes more widely distributed, more familiar to more actors, and more accessible as a pathway to weapons development for any state or non-state actor seeking to acquire nuclear capability. The United States opposed commercial plutonium use domestically specifically because it did not want to give other countries a justification for developing their own civilian plutonium fuel cycles, which are essentially the same infrastructure as a military weapons programme viewed from a different angle. That policy endured, with bipartisan support, for more than five decades.

President Trump's executive order of May 2025, which halted the dilute-and-dispose programme and directed the Department of Energy to instead develop a plan for making the surplus plutonium available as reactor fuel, represented the most significant departure from that fifty-year policy since its establishment. The Energy Department's announcement on Tuesday implementing that order through the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program moves the departure from executive direction to operational reality. The department said the program should help the selected companies secure private funding for what is, in commercial terms, an extraordinarily valuable raw material being offered at little or no cost to the recipients, with the transport, processing, and conversion costs falling to industry rather than the government.

The conflict-of-interest dimension of the Oklo selection is not subtle and has been widely noted. Energy Secretary Chris Wright served on Oklo's board of directors before joining the Trump cabinet. The CEO of Oklo, Jacob DeWitte, was present in the Oval Office on May 23, 2025 — the day Trump signed nuclear energy executive orders — standing beside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in photographs that circulated at the time. The company's commercial interests in obtaining weapons-grade plutonium are direct: it develops small modular reactors and advanced nuclear systems for which the plutonium would serve as fuel, and receiving that fuel at minimal cost from the federal government represents a substantial subsidy to its business model. DeWitte's statement on Tuesday framing the DOE programme as creating "a pathway to use extra plutonium as bridge fuel for advanced reactors to bring more reactors online sooner" is accurate as a description of what the programme does for Oklo. Whether the Secretary of Energy's prior board membership at Oklo is relevant to the selection of Oklo as one of five companies to receive government weapons-grade plutonium is a question that the Energy Department has not directly addressed.

The nonproliferation expert community's response to the programme has been consistent and largely negative, cutting across the partisan lines that divide most energy policy debates. The September 2025 letter to Trump, signed by multiple Democratic senators, cited three specific objections that reflect the mainstream expert assessment. The first is proliferation risk: transferring weapons-grade plutonium to private companies creates new vulnerabilities in the nuclear security chain, including during transport between the government storage facilities in South Carolina, Texas, and New Mexico and whatever processing facilities the companies would use to convert the material into fuel. Each transport event, each processing step, and each storage location in a private supply chain represents a potential theft or diversion point that does not exist when the material sits under military guard at a federal weapons site. The second objection is precedent: the United States has, for five decades, used its own domestic policy as an instrument of international nonproliferation pressure, arguing that if America itself does not use plutonium commercially, other countries cannot justify doing so. Abandoning that position at home weakens the argument against plutonium fuel cycles in countries like South Korea, Japan, and France that have long wanted to expand their own civilian reprocessing programmes. The third objection is economic: the claim that converting weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel is a cost-effective solution to the disposal problem is contested by energy economists who note that the processing costs, regulatory costs, and liability management costs of civilian plutonium fuel chains are substantial, and that the startups being offered this material have not demonstrated the commercial scale at which those costs would be recoverable.

The proponents of the programme offer a counter-argument that is not without merit. The material exists. It will continue to exist for tens of thousands of years regardless of what the current administration decides to do with it. The dilute-and-dispose approach that the programme replaces was not a perfect solution either — it involved transporting the same dangerous material to New Mexico and burying it underground, creating a different but not obviously smaller set of long-term risks. If advanced nuclear reactors using mixed plutonium-uranium fuel are going to be built — and there is a compelling argument that they should be, given the scale of the energy transition challenge and the baseload characteristics of nuclear power — then the question of where the fuel comes from has to be answered, and using existing weapons-grade stockpiles rather than producing new separated plutonium from civilian reactor spent fuel could, in principle, be the less proliferative option. The Energy Department's framing of the programme as reducing US nuclear liabilities rather than creating new ones is not inherently dishonest. It is a different weighting of the same set of risks and benefits that critics weight differently.

What makes the debate genuinely difficult is that both sides are right about the facts and wrong about the emphasis. It is true that 20 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium sitting in federal storage for 24,000 years is a management problem of genuinely civilisational scale, and that converting it into fuel that is consumed in a reactor represents a form of disposition that permanently reduces the weapons-usable inventory. It is also true that moving weapons-grade material from federal military custody into a civilian commercial supply chain creates new vulnerabilities that did not previously exist, sets a precedent that other countries with nuclear material and commercial interests will use to justify their own programmes, and does so in a regulatory context where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's oversight of civilian plutonium fuel has never been fully developed because the material has never previously been subject to civilian commercial use.

The Oklo partnership with newcleo adds a dimension that has not yet received adequate attention in the American coverage of the programme. newcleo is a European company — founded in London, operating with capital from European investors — and its involvement in the processing and use of American weapons-grade plutonium raises questions about how the material would be managed under European regulatory frameworks, whether the US-European transfer of weapons-grade material would require additional arms control treaty notifications, and how the Russian government — which signed the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement specifically to achieve bilateral reduction of plutonium stockpiles — would interpret the conversion of the same material into commercial reactor fuel in partnership with a European company as compliance with or departure from that agreement's intent. The Russia question is particularly live given the Iran war context: the Russia-US relationship is at one of its lowest functional points in decades, and any American action that touches on nuclear material disposition arrangements that were originally structured as bilateral US-Russia arms control commitments is, in the current environment, guaranteed to be interpreted in Moscow through the lens of maximum suspicion.

Tuesday's announcement was the selection of companies for advanced negotiations, not the finalisation of contracts. The negotiations will cover the specific terms under which the material would be transferred, the security arrangements for transport and processing, the regulatory framework that would govern its conversion into fuel, the liability allocation between the government and the private companies, and the pricing structure — if any — for the material itself. All of those negotiations are, in principle, opportunities for the nonproliferation concerns to be incorporated into the programme's design in ways that address at least some of the objections. The history of the United States government's management of nuclear materials, however, suggests that once the political decision has been made and the companies have been selected and the market expectations have been set — Oklo's stock was already up 5.5 percent on Tuesday morning — the gravitational pull toward completion is very strong. The question of whether the advanced negotiations produce an outcome that adequately addresses the security concerns that five decades of bipartisan American nuclear policy was designed to manage is the most consequential question in American energy and security policy that almost nobody is talking about.

The half-life of the material being discussed is 24,000 years. The decisions being made about it this week will be evaluated, and will have consequences, across timescales that make every other policy debate currently occupying Washington feel very short indeed.

Sources

1. CNN — The Trump Administration Is Working on a Deal to Give Weapons-Grade Plutonium to Energy Companies — https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/26/climate/trump-administration-plutonium-deal-energy-companies
2. Reuters / WHBL — US Picks Potential Partners for Using Cold War-Era Plutonium as Fuel — https://whbl.com/2026/05/26/oklo-says-it-is-in-talks-to-use-us-cold-war-era-plutonium-as-nuclear-fuel/
3. GV Wire / New York Times — US Seeks to Give Weapons-Grade Plutonium to Startups for Fuel — https://gvwire.com/2026/05/26/us-seeks-to-give-weapons-grade-plutonium-to-startups-for-fuel/
4. Senator Edward Markey — Markey Slams Trump Administration's Plan to Hand Over 20 Metric Tons of Cold War-Era Plutonium to Private Industry — https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/markey-slams-trump-administrations-plan-to-hand-over-20-metric-tons-of-cold-war-era-plutonium-to-private-industry
5. Senator Edward Markey — Letter to President Trump on Plutonium Transfer to Private Industry, September 2025 — https://www.markey.senate.gov/download/plutonium-transfer-to-private-industry?download=1
6. Reuters / KFGO — US Picks Potential Partners for Using Cold War-Era Plutonium as Fuel — https://kfgo.com/2026/05/26/oklo-says-it-is-in-talks-to-use-us-cold-war-era-plutonium-as-nuclear-fuel/
7. Reuters / WTVB — US Picks Potential Partners for Using Cold War-Era Plutonium as Fuel — https://wtvbam.com/2026/05/26/oklo-says-it-is-in-talks-to-use-us-cold-war-era-plutonium-as-nuclear-fuel/