Yesterday, President Trump issued four executive orders related to nuclear energy.

Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base

Strengthening the Domestic Nuclear Fuel Cycle…Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy…shall prepare…a report that includes…recommendations for the efficient use of the uranium, plutonium, and other products recovered through recycling and reprocessing;

The Secretary of Energy shall halt the surplus plutonium dilute and dispose program except with respect to the Department of Energy’s legal obligations to the State of South Carolina. In place of this program, the Secretary of Energy shall establish a program to dispose of surplus plutonium by processing and making it available to industry in a form that can be utilized for the fabrication of fuel for advanced nuclear technologies.

Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security

It is the policy of the United States to…enable private sector investment, innovation, development, and use of advanced nuclear technologies in the United States, recognizing their benefit to national security, by aligning incentives across the Federal Government to fully leverage federally owned uranium and plutonium resources declared excess to defense needs, related nuclear material, supply chain components, and research and development infrastructure

Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy shall identify all useful uranium and plutonium material within the Department of Energy’s inventories that may be recycled or processed into nuclear fuel for reactors in the United States.

This is going to change a lot of things. Suddenly, the plutonium resources of the United States just got made available as nuclear fuel. And we have a LOT of plutonium in our spent fuel…

But I want to talk about uranium-233.

Because if you read those executive orders carefully, every single argument they make for saving plutonium applies — with even greater force — to the uranium-233 that DOE is actively destroying at Oak Ridge National Laboratory right now, today, this week.

Let’s take them one at a time.

“Halt the surplus plutonium dilute and dispose program.”

The President just looked at the plutonium dilute-and-dispose program — where DOE was mixing weapons-grade plutonium with other materials to render it useless as fuel — and said: stop. That’s a valuable national asset. Make it available for advanced reactors instead.

The U-233 downblending program at ORNL is the same program applied to a different fissile material. DOE takes U-233, dissolves it in acid, mixes it with depleted uranium until the concentration drops below any useful level, solidifies it in cement, and ships it to Nevada for burial. The logic the President applied to plutonium applies word-for-word to U-233. If dilute-and-dispose is wrong for plutonium, it is wrong for U-233.

The difference — and it is a critical difference — is that U-233 is irreplaceable in a way that plutonium is not. We make plutonium every day in every operating reactor in America. We have no way to make more U-233. The production reactors that created our existing inventory — at Hanford and Savannah River — were decommissioned decades ago and would cost many billions of dollars to replace. When the last canister of separated U-233 is downblended, that material is gone from the human story. Forever.

“Identify all useful uranium and plutonium material within DOE’s inventories that may be recycled or processed into nuclear fuel.”

The executive order gave the Secretary of Energy 90 days to do this inventory. That 90-day deadline passed in August 2025.

I would like to ask: was U-233 included?

I doubt it. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management — the office responsible for the U-233 program — does not think of U-233 as a fuel asset. They think of it as a cleanup liability. It has been in their portfolio since 2006, when Congress transferred responsibility from the Office of Nuclear Energy to EM, the department’s “garbage men.” From that moment, U-233’s institutional classification changed from “fissile material” to “waste to be disposed of.” That classification has never been formally reversed, despite the fact that U-233 is — by any technical measure — a more valuable reactor fuel than the plutonium the President just ordered preserved.

U-233 is the only fissile material that can directly start a thorium molten-salt reactor. Plutonium can do many useful things in advanced reactors, but it cannot do that specific thing. The thorium fuel cycle — the cycle that produces far less long-lived nuclear waste, runs on a fuel three times more abundant than uranium in the earth’s crust, and that China has now deployed in an operational reactor — requires U-233 to get started. Once the thorium fuel cycle is running, a reactor produces more U-233 than it consumes. But without an initial inventory of U-233 to light the fire, there is no fire to light.

We have that initial inventory. We are destroying it.

“Fully leverage federally owned uranium and plutonium resources declared excess to defense needs.”

This phrase from the National Security executive order is important. U-233 was declared “excess to defense needs” — that’s how EM got it. But “excess to defense needs” was never meant to mean “worthless.” It meant “we don’t need it for weapons.” There is an enormous space between “not needed for weapons” and “should be permanently destroyed at enormous expense.”

The executive order’s policy is to leverage excess fissile materials for advanced reactor development. That is exactly what Flibe Energy and other thorium reactor developers have been asking DOE to do with U-233 for years. The President has now made it policy. DOE is now out of compliance with that policy every single day that Isotek runs the downblending equipment in Building 2026.

What needs to happen.

Secretary Wright needs to pick up the phone and call the head of DOE-EM and say four words: stop downblending the U-233.

That’s it. That’s the action. Everything else — the storage feasibility study, the transfer to HEUMF at Y-12 or to Idaho National Laboratory, the longer-term plan for how U-233 gets used in advanced reactor development — can be worked out during a 90-day pause. DOE’s own internal experts recommended exactly this pause back in 2011. It was never ordered. The recommendation sat on a shelf while the downblending program slowly gathered momentum.

The momentum is now considerable. Isotek exceeded its FY2025 processing goals ahead of schedule. They are proud of this. They are good at their jobs. But their job — as currently defined — is destroying a national treasure. The President’s executive orders redefine what the job should be. Someone needs to tell Isotek that the job description has changed.

The highest-purity, most easily transferred material — what Isotek called “Thorium Express,” the low-dose oxide powders that were the most valuable for any future reactor program — has likely already been processed. That is genuinely heartbreaking. But what remains is still worth fighting for. The remaining inventory still contains separated U-233 that, if transferred to secure storage, could serve as the seed material for the first American thorium reactor demonstration.

China’s thorium MSR is running. We invented that technology. We abandoned it. We gave China the design information. And now, at the very moment when thorium reactor development is becoming strategically critical — at the very moment when the President is ordering DOE to treat fissile materials as assets rather than liabilities — we are still destroying the one material that no one else on earth has in separated form.

The President’s executive orders are the opening we have been waiting for since 2006. But executive orders don’t implement themselves. Someone has to connect the dots between what the President ordered in May 2025 and what Isotek is doing in Building 2026 right now.

We are trying to be that someone. If you agree that this matters, contact Senator Tuberville’s office, contact Secretary Wright’s office, and share this post. The window is open. It will not stay open forever — and neither will the U-233 inventory.