War's New Fuel

The Pentagon needs nuclear power. A start-up plans to harvest it from radioactive waste the U.S. leaves sitting idle

- BY SARAH SCOLES

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.

“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.