Members of the Democratic Party are expressing doubt for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) alleged plan to give at least 20 metric tons of weapons-usable plutonium to the private sector for commercial energy use.
Such a move would risk putting weapons in the wrong hands and harming the nation’s defense, Democratic Senator Ed Markey explained in a letter to President Trump last week, reiterating arguments he and Democratic congressmen Donald Beyer and John Garamendi made in a previous letter earlier this month.
Plutonium in reactor fuel
Plutonium is a radioactive element, most of which is human-made and used for various purposes. U.S. commercial nuclear reactors are all light-water reactors, which create plutonium when uranium splits in the fission process. Some of the plutonium also fissions, but not all, meaning that 1% of the weight of the U.S.’s spent nuclear reactor fuel is plutonium.
“Reprocessing” is when plutonium is separated from the spent fuel. Plutonium can fuel nuclear power plants, but since it can also be used in nuclear weapons, reprocessing is considered a controversial process. The U.S. doesn’t currently have a commercial reprocessing program in the country, according to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The lawmakers argue that the U.S. has avoided the commercial use of plutonium and challenged the proliferation of reprocessing technology for decades “to prevent nations with nuclear power plants from being able to extract plutonium from that fuel, which they—or terrorists into whose hands it could fall—could use to make nuclear weapons,” the letter from September 10 reads.
“Your plan—which would provide U.S. companies with plutonium from U.S. military stocks and subsidize them both to reprocess plutonium domestically and export reprocessing technology—would reverse our successful nonproliferation policy,” the lawmakers continued. “The United States cannot effectively discourage other countries from using plutonium for civil purposes if we use it ourselves.”
The letters come in the wake of an article by Reuters reporting that the Trump administration is planning to give plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads to power companies as a potential reactor fuel.
Ending the surplus plutonium disposition program
In May, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, to form a program to process surplus plutonium and make it available for reactor fuel and stop the surplus plutonium disposition program as allowed by the law, according to the fact sheet. The order contextualizes the move to “jumpstart America’s nuclear energy industrial base” within a global artificial intelligence race, among other things.
Senator Markey’s September 23 letter also calls out an apparent conflict of interest within the entire dynamic; Secretary Wright was formerly on the board of Oklo, a nuclear technology start-up and “the main company interested” in getting plutonium from the DOE.
“I am concerned that your Administration is moving forward with plans to transfer plutonium to Oklo and allow it to build a reprocessing plant not because these proposals make sense for the United States,” the senator writes, “but because Oklo stands to benefit financially and Secretary Wright is acting in his former company’s interest.”
Plutonium from nuclear weapons
Furthermore, according to a recent Politico report, more than a fifth of the plutonium needed to meet Trump’s energy directives would come from plutonium pits—the radioactive cores of nuclear weapons. But the DOE is already struggling to meet Congress’ mandate to ramp up pit production to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
It remains to be seen how the U.S.’s nuclear energy and nuclear weapons strategies will continue to evolve over the next three years—two sides of the same coin that will either deliver cleaner energy or the demolition of our civilization.
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