Three CEOs who see opportunities in nuclear waste

• All are betting on the idea that the dangerously radioactive byproducts of nuclear power plants can be recycled into usable fuel.
• The concept — used in other countries, but not in the U.S. in decades — has gotten a big push from the administration.

Driving the news: Oklo recently announced a $1.68 billion recycling facility in Tennessee, while Curio has collaborated with DOE's national laboratories on lab-scale demonstrations and SHINE signed an agreement with Orano to develop pilot programs.

• Some nuclear experts are deeply skeptical about potentially high costs as well as whether terrorists could easily acquire to-be-recycled material.
• But a bill that would streamline the process for approving recycling plants easily won bipartisan approval this month from a Senate committee.

Here's a look at the three would-be waste wizards.

Jacob DeWitte

Why he matters: DeWitte's company is a Sam Altman-backed venture. He attended the signing of President Trump's nuclear executive orders in May.

• Oklo is working on an initial commercial facility at Idaho National Laboratory to recycle used fuel into material for reactors like Oklo's Aurora "fast" reactor.

Zoom in: These reactors use neutrons with high kinetic energy to sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction instead of the slower thermal neutrons used in conventional reactors.

• John Kotek, the Nuclear Energy Institute's senior vice president of policy development and public affairs, is among those impressed with Oklo's approach. "We know that technology works," he told Axios.
• DeWitte said he hopes the Tennessee site can begin producing metal fuel for Aurora by the early 2030s, if not sooner.

What he's saying: Oklo's approach "is more cost-effective and extraordinarily proliferation-resistant," he told Axios.

• "And now we're entering this world where we're kind of seeing all this activity around building a lot of reactors and a lot of nuclear plants, and we need fuel for them. For a lot of reasons, we're just in a really great spot to see that kind of come to fruition."

Ed McGinnis

Why he matters: McGinnis has held several nuclear-related jobs in past presidential administrations, including his work as principal deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy under Trump from 2017 to 2019.

• Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited Curio earlier this year to learn about its technology.

Zoom in: Curio's method differs from traditional reprocessing, which uses nitric acid and extracts pure streams of weapons-usable plutonium.

• It says its process can shrink high-level waste volumes to about 4% of their original amount.
• "It's a generational improvement over the reprocessing recycling technology that's used in France, Russia, Japan ... It's environmentally responsible, has built-in security by design and is economically robust," McGinnis told Axios.
• Some experts think investing in fuel recycling could be cheaper than producing high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) — a reactor fuel that only Russia and China make at commercial scale — from scratch.

McGinnis said the company plans to conduct an additional "scale-up" process with the national labs before seeking to put the technology on the market within a few years.

• Curio recently announced a partnership with Infinity Power to advance usage of high-energy isotopes and completed an all-stock acquisition of TriVis, a nuclear waste management and reactor construction company.
• He said competition from other companies doesn't faze him because each is using different approaches: "It's apples and oranges and pears. There are so many different ways to recycle."

Greg Piefer

Why he matters: Piefer's company focuses on fusion, the power of the stars.

• Though fusion is still early in development, the Energy Department recently announced a fusion roadmap. It's also drawn the attention of a think tank led by former top Google executive Eric Schmidt.

Zoom in: Piefer has a four-part strategy to commercialize technologies on the way to generating fusion energy, one of which is waste recycling. Another is making medical isotopes to treat cancer and other diseases.

• In SHINE's technique, neutrons — a side product of the fusion process — are beamed at long-lived isotopes in waste to break them into shorter-lived isotopes.
• It then hopes to sell the uranium and plutonium it recovers to partners that can turn it into reactor fuel rods. Piefer's goal is to operate a pilot plant in the 2030s.

What he's saying: "The reason I'm so confident is the facility that we built for medicine is licensed by the exact same part of the NRC as a recycling facility would be," he told Axios.

• "Sometimes I even refer to the isotope plant as almost like a pilot plant for what we want to do with waste."