Thanks for a sharp conversation across orbit and critical minerals during a Climate Week NYC panel hosted by @BCapitalGroup and @CerberusCapital and fellow panelists from @rivensystems and @StarCatcherInd like @rushspace. My message: the US is sitting on roughly 100,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel, a national resource holding fuel for reactors and isotopes that can provide power for decades. At @ProjectOmegaHQ we're building the refinery for the nuclear century.

Tomorrow, I'm joining @Greg_Lindsay, @YingShirleyMeng, and Jeff Marootian (CEO of @UL_Standards) to talk about how resilient energy systems are critical for energy independence at @FastCompany's Innovation Festival in NYC. Come check it out:

It was a pleasure hosting our Congressman, @RepAuchincloss, in @ProjectOmegaHQ's Massachusetts laboratory earlier this week. We're doing incredible work with partners at @PNNLab, @INL, @DARPA, and @ARPAE to refine nuclear waste and separate energy-dense materials for portable power sources, they're like a battery that lasts 30 years. Together with leaders in @HouseCommerce, we're reviving America's nuclear industry just in time to fulfill our rapidly increasing energy needs.

Kudos to @ADoricko and the @RainmakerCorp team for taking a fact-based and scientific approach. Proper measurement and verification is critical for weather technologies, and it’s been missing until recently.

The narrative around nuclear energy in the U.S. has been shaped by misconceptions and policy failures rather than technical limitations. In reality, nuclear power is safer than many alternatives (e.g., coal), but public perception remains skewed due to costs and scary messaging versus lives lost. The U.S. government’s failure to uphold waste storage agreements has created logistical and legal issues, not scientific issues. Meanwhile, strategic decisions led to dependence on foreign energy sources and challenges to our supply chain for isotope access. Although interest in nuclear is resurging, only companies actively building infrastructure will be successful @AntaresNuclear, @AaloAtomics, @TheNuclearCo, @standardnuclear, @valaratomics, @Oklo, @generalmatter, and us at @ProjectOmegaHQ, to name a few. Like electricity in its early days, nuclear still faces uncertainty and some fear that can be overcome through standards, education, and time. With recent advancement with reactors and the President’s Executive Orders advancing nuclear, things are starting to change. Be a part of the change.

People talk about the American manufacturing renaissance like it's a political slogan. We outsourced our manufacturing base to China more than 30 years because cheap labor, cheap energy, and a frictionless supply chain. during this same time, we let the nuclear industry in this country atrophy. We told ourselves we'd be friends forever and built an economy dependent on a strategic adversary. We're now in the position of needing to rebuild both at the same time. Bringing that manufacturing back for semiconductors, rare earth processing, battery components, defense supply chains, etc. requires enormous amounts of electricity that is reliable, always-on, high-density electricity that can power industrial processes around the clock. But you have to actually generate that electricity needed. Wind and solar are intermittent. They're part of the answer. But you cannot run a 24/7 industrial operation on power that depends on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. You need baseload power that’s steady, reliable, always available. That's nuclear. Reactors in the U.S. generate power continuously. They do that regardless of weather, season, or time of day. The fuel is domestically producible… if we rebuild the fuel cycle we let atrophy. The carbon intensity is close to zero compared to most other energy sources. You can't reindustrialize America without solving the energy problem and you can't solve the energy problem without nuclear.

When Russia cut off natural gas to Europe after invading Ukraine in 2022, two interesting things happened. • Germany's energy prices exploded. Factories shut down. The government scrambled to reopen coal plants they'd just closed. • France kept the lights on. It's because of a decision France made decades ago. France generates about 70% of its electricity from nuclear power. More importantly, they recycle their spent nuclear fuel. They run a mixed-oxide fuel cycle. They take used fuel, separate out the reusable uranium, fabricate it into fresh fuel, and run it through their reactors again. The result is a country that produces most of its own electricity, recycles its own fuel, and doesn't depend on Russian pipelines or Middle Eastern supply chains to keep its lights on. Germany went the other direction. They had shut down their nuclear plants on the assumption that renewables would fill the gap and Russian gas would stay cheap and reliable. Neither assumption held. Energy independence is built over decades through infrastructure decisions. We now have the opportunity to build a nuclear infrastructure here in the United States to provide us greater energy resilience. And that includes the more than 90,000 metric tons of used fuel sitting at 75 sites across the country waiting for us to use to power the next generation of innovations.

People ask me what @ProjectOmegaHQ means for the future, here’s one example. Your iPhone. The one you're charging right now. The one you forgot to plug in last night. It always dies at 4pm, when you actually need it. We can change that, with the portable nuclear power sources that we’re developing, safely. It’s not new, we all already have at least one nuclear device in our homes, keeping us safe. We've been so constrained by what current power sources can do that we've stopped imagining what devices could do if the battery problem went away entirely, or if your iPhone was self-charging. We are building the defense version, the space version, the AI version of this. In the future, we aim to make the consumer version too.

First product mention in @tomshardware! Achievement unlocked, @ProjectOmegaHQ

Most people hear "radioactive decay" and think: danger, cleanup, decades of storage costs. We hear: untapped energy. @ProjectOmegaHQ is part of a team that includes @northropgrumman, @MorganStateU, and @PNNLab that received a $3.37M Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency @DARPA contract under the Rads to Watts program, announced today. The goal is to generate electricity directly from isotopes, recovered from Cold War-era nuclear waste and recycled nuclear fuel. The system uses beta-emitters layered onto semiconductor devices to meet power density targets that older technology couldn't approach. Here's what that actually means in practice: Power sources for satellites, moon bases, and Mars landers that provide mission-critical energy even when the sun doesn't shine. Autonomous recharging stations on the ocean floor for UUVs that operate continuously for 20 years, keeping national security assets running in places where swapping batteries isn't an option. And much more: businesswire.com/news/home/2…

In the 1980s, the US Department of Energy made a promise to every nuclear power plant operator in America. Step 1: Build your plant. Step 2: Pay into the Nuclear Waste Fund. Step 3: We will take your spent fuel by 1998. The operators (Constellation, Dominion Energy, Southern Nuclear, Duke Energy Corporation, etc.) built their plants and paid into the fund, tens of billions. 1998 came and went. The plan had been to build a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a deep, geologically stable site in the desert where used nuclear fuel could be stored safely for thousands of years. The site was chosen after years of study and construction was authorized by Congress, but… politics. So the fuel stayed at 52 sites across the country, in pools and dry casks, and the operators started suing. Lawsuits don’t solve anything, I can tell you from experience. 96% of that material is reusable uranium. The conversation has been entirely about storage and disposal and almost nobody has been asking how to extract the value still locked inside it. Yucca Mountain failed because we were trying to bury an asset. The better answer was always to recycle it.

What gets called nuclear waste still holds over 90% of its original energy. We stopped at step one of a three-step process to utilize this resource. Now, we aim to turn used nuclear fuel into a national resource.