Every atom is a coiled source of power. But some atoms pack more punch than others. The radioactive elements fueling nuclear reactors can be coaxed into generating so much power that in the mid-1950s Lewis Strauss, then chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, predicted electricity would soon be “too cheap to meter.”
Civilian nuclear power fell short of that utopian hype, but it succeeded in creating a lot of waste. This residue is not the glowing green sludge of popular imagination, although it is dangerous: some components of spent fuel remain thermally hot for years and radioactive for millennia.
To some countries, that pulsing energy is a potential resource. Project Omega, a Rhode Island–based start-up that emerged from stealth mode in February, wants to take that trash and make it new again.
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“What we do today is take that spent fuel out of the reactor, put it into a pool of water for a few years just to let it cool down, and then put it onto a concrete pad next to the reactor,” says Stafford Sheehan, Project Omega’s founder and CEO. He wants to move the waste from the concrete pad to a bath of hot salts, extract the useful elements and feed them back into nuclear reactors—or into other technology such as long-lived sensors that power military satellites.
Mining this atomic rubbish is particularly attractive for military applications. Vehicle convoys, for instance, are vulnerable targets. Radioactivity could power them, no refueling required. Remote outposts could use advanced reactors running on reprocessed fuel. The federal government wants to increase the country’s, and the military’s, nuclear capacity. But it lacks the infrastructure to recycle the output.
Vehicle convoys are vulnerable targets. Radioactivity could power them, no refueling required.
Sheehan wants to seize on the opening. “Nuclear is having a moment,” he declares: in May 2025 President Donald Trump signed executive orders encouraging the development of advanced reactors, even directing the Department of Defense to build one at a domestic military base. But as things stand, their waste, and the energy locked inside it, will be buried. “It’s a totally missed opportunity,” Sheehan says.
Other countries are exploiting it. France, China and Russia reprocess their nuclear toss-offs, using an acid-based method to sift out useful elements.
The U.S. abstains, largely because of proliferation concerns. Standard reprocessing of radioactive waste produces a stream of pure plutonium. Plutonium is the magic bean of nuclear weapons. Making more of it increases the risk of it spreading, something the U.S. has fought against for decades. “We made arguments to various partners—allies—that because we don’t recycle, you don’t need to recycle, either,” says Jenifer Shafer, a former Department of Energy employee, now at the Colorado School of Mines. “That put us in a position where we, from a political standpoint, maybe tied our hands a little bit.”
Yet the U.S. still needs nonplutonium radioactive elements, such as specialized isotopes for medical use and fuel for its own reactors, so it often buys the fruits of foreign labor. “We have been procuring a lot of those isotopes from Russia,” Shafer says. This dependence is a strategic choke point: if Moscow turns off the tap, vital American hardware will never leave the ground. Project Omega proposes an in-house supply of recycled material—without the same plutonium risk—which would make the U.S. more self-sufficient without making it hypocritical.
Project Omega plans to use a different process: a molten salt reaction. The company heats a salt such as lithium chloride until it liquefies, then mixes it with the waste, a toxic cocktail of metal oxides of radioactive elements. A chemical process transforms them into pure metals. These metals go into another molten salt bath to extract uranium, and then final processes in the saline hot tub pull out other elements. The company’s approach is a cross between an aluminum smelter and an oil refinery. It still produces plutonium, but the element remains chemically trapped in a messy soup of other materials—not so useful for anyone trying to sneak a nuke.
It’s not easy work. The end product is more unruly than the output of plutonium-uranium reduction extraction, the standard acid method. The process also generates oxygen, which corrodes equipment. But Shafer suggests that R&D dollars could solve both problems. Slowing down the waste stream reduces the need to call Russia for radioactive material and allows civilians and the military to get the most bang for their uranium buck.
Once revived, the waste comes in a few forms. The leftover uranium could go back into reactors. The lesser isotopes, in Project Omega’s vision, could power small devices. “Think about an iPhone that never dies,” Sheehan says, a bit grandly.
The Pentagon may have a different kind of always-on in mind. Plans in the works could require isotopes to power sensors in space, autonomous drones that could stay aloft for months and computers processing intelligence data. For soldiers disconnected from the grid, power would be one fewer problem to worry about.
To make it work, Project Omega wants government partnership. It is making progress; the company recently received an award letter from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And for now the “hot” work happens through a partnership with the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Project Omega recently built a microprocessor power source using the isotope strontium-90 in conjunction with a national lab, where government scientists inserted the device’s actual hot commodity. The microprocessor worked. And no green sludge leaked out.