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America should be cheering when American entrepreneurs step up where Washington and foreign powers have failed, and that’s exactly what Stafford Sheehan’s Project Omega promises. The Rhode Island startup has emerged from stealth aiming to turn America’s growing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel into long-lived power sources, and it has already raised venture backing and government interest. This is the kind of private-sector initiative that strengthens our security and solves problems nobody in the political class seems willing to tackle.
The problem is neither theoretical nor distant: decades of nuclear power have left roughly 100,000 tons of spent fuel sitting in pools and dry casks across the country, while much of its energy value — by some counts more than 90 percent — remains untapped. That pile will only grow as the nation leans back into nuclear to power industry, data centers, and AI infrastructure, so treating spent fuel as a strategic resource rather than a political liability is common-sense conservatism. If we can extract value and shrink hazards at the same time, we should do it on American soil under American oversight.
Project Omega says it has already demonstrated a proof of concept: material processed in its lab has been tested at national labs like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and shown to produce measurable electrical power from isotopes such as strontium-90. Turning radioactive decay into practical batteries for sensors, remote systems, and military kits isn’t science fiction — it’s a practical application of decades of betavoltaic research being adapted by American ingenuity. The public-private lab partnerships here are exactly how breakthroughs get de-risked before scaling.
Investors have taken notice: Project Omega announced a roughly $12 million seed round and is working under ARPA-E funding and a pending Department of Defense contract to produce radioisotope power for “dull, dirty, or dangerous” missions. That focus on small, long-duration power sources — the kind that could keep sensors, drones, and deep-sea or space systems running for years without maintenance — is smart because it creates early, revenue-generating markets rather than waiting a decade for big reactors and politics to align. Private capital plus targeted government customers is the fastest way to translate lab success into real national capability.
Make no mistake: the market is contested and the incumbents are international, with firms like France’s Orano dominating parts of the fuel cycle and other countries throwing state support behind their champions. The Department of Energy is also funding other recycling efforts across the U.S., so America can and must build a domestic supply chain rather than outsource our strategic materials to Paris, Moscow, or Beijing. A nationalism of production — not dependency — is what will secure America’s energy and technological edge.
Conservatives should rally behind this kind of technological patriotism. It’s not anti-environment to insist on responsible, homegrown handling of nuclear materials; it’s pro-sovereignty and pro-worker to insist these valuable resources be processed here, creating jobs and cutting reliance on geopolitical rivals. If the left had any coherent plan beyond slogan-driven obstruction, we might have needed their help — but when they stand in the way, the private sector and sensible regulators must move faster.
Washington’s regulators must do their job without turning every sensible innovation into a ten-year clearance marathon. That doesn’t mean ignoring safety — far from it — but it does mean streamlining approvals for defensible, incremental deployments and fast-tracking defense and critical-infrastructure applications. Congress and the DOE should incentivize domestic recycling facilities, protect intellectual property, and ensure American firms hold the high ground in isotopes and materials critical for the next generation of electronics and defense systems.
Hardworking Americans earned their place at the front of the industrial table, and we shouldn’t cede strategic industries to foreign states or bureaucratic paralysis. Project Omega and startups like it are the kind of gritty, results-oriented companies that will turn a headache into an advantage — and that’s the kind of American comeback every patriot should support.
