Trump Accelerates Plans to Transfer Cold War-Era Plutonium to Private Companies

The Department of Energy is reportedly in talks with five companies, including a California-based advanced nuclear technology corporation called Oklo, to offload the government’s Cold War stockpile of plutonium.

Oklo has ties to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who respectively chaired and served on the company’s board of directors.

According to a press release, the “advanced negotiations” will proceed under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program, a plan backed by President Donald Trump to convert the plutonium into fuel for nuclear reactors.

“This program creates a pathway to use existing surplus material as bridge fuel for advanced reactors to bring more reactors online sooner,” Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said. “Material that has been set aside for disposal can instead be converted into fuel to produce electricity through fission.”

Oklo will work with Newcleo, a European nuclear reactor developer that would “bring relevant fuel experience and potential project capital” to the partnership. Companies like Oklo can repurpose the plutonium in mixed oxide, or MOX, fuel, a blend of depleted uranium with recycled plutonium.

Uranium is the primary fuel for standard nuclear reactions, but when plutonium is produced in the fission process, the byproduct also contributes to up to a third of the reactor’s total energy. At the conclusion of the Cold War, treaties like START I in 1991 and START II in 1993 imposed dramatic reductions on U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The decrease left the U.S. government with massive amounts of highly toxic plutonium and an unclear off-ramp for disposing of the material.

Trump planned to make 20 metric tons of its plutonium stockpile available to private companies as fuel for reactors, according to a report from Reuters last year. The federal government was previously engaged in efforts to permanently dispose of the plutonium in a process called “plutonium downblending,” which reduces the overall radioactive concentration of fissile material. Supplying nuclear companies with the plutonium as fuel would do little to decrease the inherent radioactivity of the highly unstable material.

The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment or provide additional details about any increased safety measures for the potential plutonium transfer.

Democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns that Trump’s plans to allow energy companies to use the plutonium as fuel could escalate global nuclear tensions.

“The transfer of weapons-usable plutonium to private industry would increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, including to rogue states or terrorists,” Sen. Ed Markey, Rep. John Garamendi and Rep. Don Beyer wrote in a September 2025 letter after Trump’s plans for the plutonium were reported.

The congressmen asserted that the U.S. government cannot “effectively discourage other countries from using plutonium for civil purposes” if the stockpile is distributed to the private sector.

Oklo is backed by Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. The artificial intelligence executive was chair of the nuclear fission company’s board of directors for over a decade and has praised Trump for his business-friendly approach to the presidency. Altman served on Oklo’s board alongside Wright before both of them stepped down in 2025 — though the energy secretary recused himself to avoid conflict-of-interest concerns before he assumed the top office at the DOE.

Markey called out Wright for his ties to the company in a separate letter from September 2025 addressed to the president.

“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, but because Oklo stands to benefit financially and Secretary Wright is acting in his former company’s interest,” Markey wrote.

The DOE told Reuters at the time that Wright had complied with all ethics and financial disclosure requirements and had never owned Oklo stock.