Spent fuel from nuclear reactors sits in storage at roughly 80 locations across the United States, awaiting a final solution. One option is to entomb radioactive waste underground for millennia, as Finland is doing. But permanent burial proved politically impossible in America after Nevadans – whose swing-state votes presidential candidates from both parties covet – successfully blocked the underground facility at Yucca Mountain from ever opening. Another option is to recycle the spent fuel, as the French and Russians do.

There is enough energy still contained in the nation’s stockpile of nuclear waste to power U.S. electricity needs for a century. But the traditional method for reprocessing nuclear waste into fresh fuel is fairly close to what you’d need to make weapons-grade radioactive materials. That’s why then-President Jimmy Carter banned commercial nuclear waste recycling in 1977, canceling a debut project on which investors had already spent billions of dollars and effectively killing the industry, since no one wanted to take on that kind of risk again even after Ronald Reagan lifted the prohibition just a few years later. India had just become the first country since the signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to get the bomb. Since the U.S. reactor buildout was slowing down anyway, Carter saw America’s first waste recycling plant as a worthy sacrifice at the altar of peace.

With electricity demand surging yet again and climate change putting a premium on atomic energy’s zero carbon output, the U.S. is planning a new reactor-building spree. Now Orano, the French state-owned nuclear fuel company that runs Europe’s leading waste reprocessing plant at La Hague, is getting serious about finally bringing recycling to American shores.

On Wednesday, Orano is set to announce a new partnership with the Washington, D.C.-based waste recycling startup Curio LV to buy reprocessed uranium to make fresh fuel in the U.S. and set up a new industry alliance to bolster the effort, this newsletter can exclusively report.

It’s part of the French behemoth’s push into the U.S.

Orano struck a similar deal last year with SHINE Technologies to help the Wisconsin-based company take apart nuclear waste to extract valuable isotopes.

In January, Orano forged a tentative partnership with Curio. The latest agreement cements that relationship, teeing up Orano and Curio to work on all aspects of recycling nuclear waste in the U.S., including leading a coalition of companies urging federal and state officials to clear a path for building the new industry from scratch.

“Here in the U.S., this conversation about reprocessing and recycling is all of a sudden hitting a higher pitch,” Curtis Roberts II, a U.S. spokesman for Orano, told me by phone.

Curio has connections that can help raise the volume for Orano. The Trump administration has expressed support for nuclear waste recycling. Before joining Curio, chief executive Edward McGinnis capped off more than a decade spent working on atomic power at the Department of Energy by serving as President Donald Trump’s first-term director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“It’s a very good sign that an all-American startup like ours is partnering with a world-leading company such as Orano from France, with all its experience,” McGinnis told me. “It’s an extremely good sign for the United States and the future of our nuclear competitiveness.”

The deal isn’t just about political ties. Curio’s technology is also designed to ease concerns over weapons proliferation. Unlike the PUREX process Orano uses at La Hague, which relies on nitric acid to dissolve waste products and extract valuable materials, Curio uses high-temperature heat and electricity. Rather than separating out plutonium, a key product for warheads, Curio produces a mixed, transuranic fuel.

McGinnis said that allows Curio to get around American “sensitivities” when it comes to recycling nuclear waste. But Roberts said Orano’s traditional approach served a vital role as “a proven process that’s been done for years.”

“It could easily be stood up in the U.S., so there’s quick implementation,” Roberts said. “But the Curio approach… has a lot of modern efficiencies.”

Either way, Orano cautioned that commercial recycling is still in its early days in the U.S., despite support that ranges from progressive New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Trump.

“It’s not even a nascent industry yet,” Roberts said. ‘We’re still looking to figure out the funding for the technology. It all depends on how the federal government develops its approach.”

In the meantime, Curio is looking to the states. McGinnis said he’s spoken at the state capitals in Arkansas, Louisiana, Utah and Washington in recent months

PROGRAMMING NOTES: Since I last wrote to you, I had a few pieces published in Canary Media – one on Hyundai’s big low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana, the other on a bipartisan bill to boost green building materials sailing through Congress.

I had a scoop in Heatmap on geothermal company XGS’s latest round of funding, which doubled as a small feature on why the nuclear industry seems so drawn to this particular startup in the industry. For GZERO Media, I wrote about why Afghanistan's critical minerals could be a major factor in the thawing relations between the U.S. and the Taliban.

I also made my debut in The Atlantic, where I wrote about a feature on the rise of geothermal power.

If you’re looking for a Twitter – er, X – alternative, I wanted to plug Warpcast, the site I have been posting on for the past month. It’s smaller than Bluesky, and much more focused on things like crypto and web3. But it’s a super engaged, thoughtful and politically omnivorous community where I have really had a lot of fun conversations recently. I’m sticking around there to keep growing my following, and I encourage you to consider it.

Finally, here’s the biggest news of all – perhaps the biggest news of my entire life. On Friday, right at the start of Shabbat, my wife Amanda gave birth to our first child, a healthy and beautiful baby girl named Eve Basha Kaufman. As I wrote this newsletter to you today, I was nodding off from exhaustion. (Please forgive any typos!) But she is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I used to think it was some hyperbolic cliche for parents to say stuff like that. But the moment I first held her at the hospital in Manhattan, I understood. I would love to share a photo with you, but we are not posting public images of her online. I’m too disturbed by the trajectory of facial recognition technology, AI and algorithms, and I want to help her make an informed choice of her own about how to share her own data. If you know me in real life, however, feel free to reach out for a cute one. I’m eager to brag.

The soundtrack to this edition is “Take A Ride” by T. Markakis, a producer from Greece who has – in my opinion – created a song with all the ingredients for a perfect house track: the driving beat, the plunking glassy percussion, the airy chords, the soulful reverby vocal sample, the light orchestral strings at the end, the bass-slapping crescendo.

For now, yawning off from a brisk Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I’m lucky to have an extremely generous and loving mother-in-law to help swaddle my little Eve.