The Half-Life of a Pivot

The government wants to give weapons-grade plutonium to startups.

Read that sentence again. I did, twice.

The logic is coherent enough at altitude: surplus material from the weapons program could be reprocessed into nuclear fuel by private companies, accelerating the clean energy transition. Fine. The physics works. The need is real. The math of decarbonization has always had a nuclear-shaped hole in it that people keep stepping around for political reasons.

But I keep getting stuck on the word startups.

Startups fail. Not occasionally — structurally, as a designed feature of the model. The entire venture apparatus is built around expecting most bets not to work. The ones that do survive often do so because they pivoted three times, burned through their founding team, got acqui-hired, ran out of runway, changed their product entirely. This is not a bug. This is considered healthy.

None of that vocabulary maps onto weapons-grade fissile material.

What we’re actually doing is trying to solve a governance problem — who handles catastrophically dangerous things carefully, over long timescales, with institutional permanence — by deploying an economic structure that is engineered for the exact opposite properties. Speed. Disposability. Acceptable failure rates.

The irony is that nuclear energy’s actual problem has never been the physics. It’s always been the institutions. Regulatory capture, cost overruns, political timidity, public fear. “Let startups figure it out” is an answer to exactly none of those problems.

Series A. Weapons-grade plutonium. I want to read that pitch deck.