The US Has 34 Tons of Plutonium. Now What?

At the peak of the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union had amassed roughly 65,000 nuclear weapons between them. Enough to end civilization several times over. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. The arms race stopped. But all that plutonium? It didn't go away.

Now the US government has 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium sitting in storage facilities across the country, and they need to dispose of it. Why not just bury it? Because this stuff is fissile material—the same material that powers nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs. You can't just throw it in a hole and hope for the best. It needs to be converted into a form that's impossible to weaponize again, which means mixing it with uranium oxide and turning it into reactor fuel that gets burned up in commercial nuclear power plants. It's expensive. It's complicated. And the government keeps pushing back the timeline.

The real question is whether the US will actually commit the money and political will to finish the job. Because leaving 34 tons of plutonium hanging around indefinitely isn't exactly a national security win. The longer it sits, the longer the risk persists—and the longer this becomes someone else's problem to solve.