US Government Offers Cold War Plutonium to Nuclear Startups

The Trump administration is converting dormant weapons material into feedstock for advanced reactor companies, collapsing the historical separation between defense infrastructure and commercial nuclear innovation. This move addresses a key constraint on next-gen reactor deployment—fuel supply—while reducing storage and security costs for legacy warhead stockpiles, aligning nonproliferation goals with venture-scale business models. The politics reshape the sector: this legitimizes small modular reactors as infrastructure rather than speculation, but concentrates fuel access among startups with government relationships, determining which reactor designs actually get built.