Washington, United States – US President Donald Trump plans to use remaining Cold War-era plutonium as potential fuel for new nuclear reactors.
A Reuters report stated that the Trump administration plans to provide about 20 metric tons of plutonium.
The process will extract plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads as potential fuel for US power reactors.
The move complements an executive order Trump signed last May.
This decision halts a large portion of the plutonium surplus disposal program. It shifts its concentration for use in advanced nuclear fuel.
The US Department of Energy will soon request proposals from industry. These proposals will provide plutonium at a low cost or free of charge.
In addition, the associated industries will bear the costs of transportation, design and construction.
The report indicated that the use of plutonium as fuel only occurred in short experiments.
Full details about the size of the material or the expected timing were not revealed.
plutonium stockpile
It is noteworthy that the total stock of usable plutonium amounts to 34 tons.
There is a US commitment to get rid of it under the 2000 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with Russia.
For its part, the Ministry of Energy has not confirmed the report. However, it is studying strategies to strengthen nuclear fuel supply chains.
The initiative comes as demand for electricity rises in the United States.
But the idea has raised concerns among nuclear safety experts. They see it as risky, recalling the failure of the expensive MOX fuel project that was canceled in 2018.
It is noteworthy that plutonium is currently preserved in very fortified facilities. It has a long half-life of 24 thousand years and needs to be handled with extreme caution.
The current program was planning to dispose of plutonium by burying it. This would take place at an experimental storage site at a cost that could reach $20 billion.
In this regard, nuclear physicist Edwin Lyman described the idea of converting plutonium into fuel as “a kind of madness.”
He called for adherence to a safe and less expensive disposal plan.
