Three Reasons Why DOE’s Plutonium Plan Has Deal Breakers

• Three Reasons Why DOE’s Plutonium Plan Has Deal Breakers
• Operating and Planned Fast Reactors that Burn Plutonium as Fuel

The five firms selected for negotiations with DOE to contract for delivery of surplus plutonium for the purpose of turning it into HALEU fuel may want to take a closer look at the program before leaping into a decision to accept the material. THere are three reasons abou the plan that could be deal breakers.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Request for Applications (RFA) published October 2025 offers to provide commercial firms plutonium derived from nuclear weapons to turn it into the MOX fuel equivalent of HALEU fuel, equal at 5 to 19% U235, is really a free ride for the agency to dispose of the plutonium.

Reason 1: Through its Surplus Plutonium Surplus Program DOE is de facto outsourcing the agency’s plutonium disposition under the guise of offering fuel for advanced reactors in return for solving DOE’s seemingly intractable problem of what to do with the agency’s growing surplus of weapons grade materials derived from disassembled nuclear weapons. DOE previously planned to dilute and bury the plutonium.

The 19.7 metric tons of plutonium materials listed by DOE as surplus in the RFA include 15.3 metric tons of plutonium in oxide form and 4.4 metric tons in metal form. It is unclear how much work will be required to convert the material into usable HALEU fuel at levels of enrichment of less than 20% U235 for use in advanced reactors.

DOE’s RFA requires that applicants may be required to pay a “cost recovery fee” for getting the plutonium. In the RFA DOE provided only general information about how the fee would be calculated and under what conditions it might be imposed.

DOE states in the RFA this effort is “unlocking the next level of private funding,” as part of its requirement that “selected companies must meet costs of carrying out their proposal.”

In other words, DOE is requiring selected firms to pay for the material and accept 100% of the financial and operational risks and obligations of working with surplus plutonium. In effect, DOE is, in effect, shifting the burden of plutonium disposition, along with all the risks, from the public sector to private firms.

Also, DOE wants a non-exclusive and free license to use the details of any successes for its own purposes. Not only will firms get the transuranic materials at their cost, but they will also be required to serve any valuable intellectual property derived from working with it without compensation. The RFA states;

“Applicants may need to grant DOE a perpetual, non-assignable license for specific uses of novel data, technical, financial, or otherwise, generated during the course of the project.”

Reason 2: DOE security requirements for the transportation and handling of the material will be extremely challenging. None of the five firms identified by DOE as candidates to receive plutonium to turn it into fuel have either the expertise or experience to comply with DOE’s stringent security and material accountability requirements. Except for Oklo, the other four are thinly capitalized startups focused on developing their unique reactor technologies which are expected to use HALEU fuel based on uranium enrichment.

Reason 3: None of the firms named by the Department of Energy have production levels of experience reprocessing plutonium metal into HALEU fuel.

Only France and Japan have decades long experience making mixed oxide fuel (MOX) from plutonium. The MOX fuel is used by a number of LWR reactors in Europe and four LWRs in Japan. The state-owned enterprises in France and Japan carry with them accountability for materials and, most importantly, the ability to pay for all phases of the reprocessing work including management of highly radioactive waste streams.

Russia makes MOX fuel for its fast reactors by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from its domestic fleet of LWR type reactors and from spent fuel from returned to Russia from reactors it built for export in other countries like India and in Eastern Europe. (see table below) but does not export it. Russia has a 60 ton/year plant built in 2015 to make MOX fuel from surplus plutonium. The output is used in its BN-600 and BN-800 fast reactors and is expected to be used in a new BN-1200 expected to be completed in the early 2030s.

China has begun making MOX fuel for two fast reactors it imported from Russia (BN-600) which China built as the CFR-600. China’s reactors have drawn international concerns due to their capabilities as “breeder reactors.” Currently, the reactors are burning uranium fuel.

Separately, DOE failed in its efforts to build a MOX fuel plant in South Carolina due to massive schedule delays, huge cost overruns, and technical difficulties in converting DOE’s forms of plutonium into MOX fuel.

A significant environmental risk is that after failing to find cost effective ways to make HALEU fuel from the material, one or more of these firms might just toss the resulting mess back on DOE’s corner creating the equivalent of new West Valley sites potentially requiring decades of cleanup work and costing taxpayers billions of dollars over time.

Note to Readers: A short version of this article was originally published as post on Linkedin on 06/02/26.

& & &

Operating and Planned Fast Reactors that Burn Plutonium as Fuel

Currently, Russia, China, and India are the top countries that have made significant investments in designing and commissioning advanced nuclear fast reactors that burn plutonium as fuel. There are none in the U.S. See table below.

It raises the question of whether DOE’s use of transuranic materials will be limited to producing MOX fuel or whether the agency has it in mind to eventually develop an initiative to fund design and deployment in the U.S. of fast reactors to burn transuranic fuel.

In the U.S. the design basis for the TerraPower reactor was the GE Hitachi PRISM reactor which was pitched in 2012 to the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to burn its stocks of surplus plutonium as its fuel. However, TerraPower’s Natrium reactor, now under construction in Wyoming, uses uranium metal fuel.

In 2018 the INL selected the PRISM reactor to be the design basis for a new test reactor for the site. The reactor project included a uranium-plutonium-zirconium alloy fuel. This type of alloy fuel was tested previously in the EBR-II reactor. However, the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) program was ended by DOE in 2022 after Congress declined to fund building it. Surplus fuel from the EBR-II program is anticipated to be used by Oklo for its first advanced reactor which is planned to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory.Current and planned fast reactors by country.

# # #