I’ve been obsessed with nuclear energy since I was a kid reading about fusion reactors in my grandfather’s old science magazines.
Not because of some apocalyptic fear or environmental crusade, but because the physics genuinely fascinated me.
The idea that you could extract millions of times more energy from a single atom than from burning coal or oil seemed like pure magic.
That fascination never went away.
As an investor, I’m drawn to energy because it’s the foundation of everything else—literally everything. An economy is just a very complex machine for converting energy into goods and services.
No energy, no economy.
And nuclear? Nuclear is where the real innovation happens. It’s where we push the boundaries of what’s physically possible. Small Modular Reactors that can be factory-built and deployed anywhere. Fusion reactors inching closer to breakeven. The promise of genuine energy abundance, not just incremental improvements.
But here’s something I’ve learned over the years: the companies that enable revolutions make more money than the revolutionaries themselves.
Everyone wants to invest in the breakthrough. The new reactor design. The fusion startup. The pioneer with the bold vision.
And those can work out—sometimes spectacularly. But more often, the real money is made in the boring infrastructure that makes the revolution actually function. The transmission lines. The cooling systems. The waste management.
Which brings me to something that’s been bothering me for months now.
I keep seeing these announcements: Amazon investing $500 million in SMRs. Microsoft restarting Three Mile Island. Google partnering with Kairos Power. Meta signing gigawatt-scale deals. It’s everywhere.
The nuclear renaissance is here, they say. AI needs clean baseload power, they say. The future is nuclear, they say.
And I agree with all of that.
But there’s this detail—this massive, glaring detail—that nobody seems to want to discuss in these breathless press releases and investor presentations.
What happens to the waste?
Not theoretically. Not “we’ll figure it out eventually.” I mean right now, today, in reality.
Because here’s what I discovered when I started pulling on this thread: The United States has accumulated 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel since the 1950s. It’s stored at 77 different sites across 35 states. Some of it will remain radioactive enough to kill you for 100,000 years.
And we don’t have a single permanent place to put any of it.
Not one.
The Number That Changed Everything
Let me give you a number that made me stop and re-read the same paragraph three times.
Since 1998, the federal government has paid nuclear utilities approximately $10.6 billion in damages. Not for accidents. Not for contamination. But simply for failing to take custody of their spent fuel as promised.
Ten billion dollars. Just in damages. And the meter’s still running at roughly $500 million per year.
This isn’t some abstract future problem. It’s costing real money, right now, every single year. And here’s the kicker: every new reactor we build makes this problem exponentially worse.
Think about what’s happening. We’re about to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity—from 100 gigawatts today to 400 gigawatts by 2050 if current plans hold. The Department of Energy is mandating SMR deployments at military installations. Tennessee Valley Authority is planning a 6-gigawatt SMR program. China’s bringing their first commercial SMR online this year.
Each of these reactors produces 20-30 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste annually.
Do the math: we’re currently adding 2,000 metric tons per year. By 2050, that could easily be 8,000+ metric tons annually. And we still haven’t figured out what to do with the 90,000 tons we already have.
This is the part that fascinates me—not in a morbid way, but in the way that massive, unsolved infrastructure problems always do. Because somewhere in this mess, there’s an opportunity. A real one.
Let me explain.
The $96 Billion Hole in the Desert
I want to tell you about Yucca Mountain, because it’s one of the most expensive failures in American history and almost nobody knows about it.
In 1987, Congress designated a site in the Nevada desert—about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas—as America’s permanent nuclear waste repository. The idea was simple: dig deep into the mountain, build a massive underground facility, and store all the nation’s high-level waste there for the next 10,000+ years.
They started spending money in 1983. By 2008, when they submitted the license application, the project had consumed $9 billion. Total projected cost over 150 years? $96.2 billion.
Then in 2010, the Obama administration killed it. Just... stopped. After 27 years and at least $19 billion spent (depending on which accounting you believe), Yucca Mountain became what Nevada’s attorney general would later call “an unfunded zombie-like federal project staggering around the halls of Congress.”
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Waste Fund—funded by a fee of 0.1 cents per kilowatt-hour on nuclear electricity—kept collecting money. Today, it sits at $44.3 billion. Earning about $1.4 billion per year in interest.
Just sitting there. Growing. While the waste keeps piling up at reactor sites.
And here’s what gets me: this isn’t a technical problem anymore. It’s a political and economic one.
France reprocesses their spent fuel and has managed 40,000 metric tons. Finland is building a repository at Olkiluoto that actually works. Canada’s consent-based siting process is making real progress.
The technology exists. The engineering is proven. What’s missing is the economic model and the political will.
Which means—and this is where it gets interesting for someone like me who looks at infrastructure—whoever figures out the business model for this wins a multi-decade monopoly worth tens of billions of dollars.
In the premium section, I break down the three companies actually positioned to solve this problem, the hidden costs embedded in every new SMR deal, and why the real opportunity isn’t in the reactor builders—it’s in the waste handlers nobody’s paying attention to yet...
The Three Companies Positioned to Win
Here’s what keeps me up at night—in a good way: while everyone’s piling into uranium miners and reactor builders, there are exactly three companies with actual, proven capabilities to handle America’s nuclear waste crisis. And two of them most people have never heard of