Peter Thiel, Nuclear Power, and Weapons-Usable Uranium Enrichment: A Billionaire’s Power Play

By The Nuclear Skeptic

Earlier this week, ProPublica published a damning exposé detailing how the Trump administration is aggressively overhauling the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to rapidly expand nuclear power, ostensibly to meet the immediate energy demands of artificial intelligence. Starting with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), coined and implemented by Elon Musk, the nuclear DOGE bros are injecting a Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” mentality into arguably the most important safety regulator on the planet.

This push to rubber stamp nuclear power projects includes mandates to speed up the approval of new nuclear reactors, including Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) that have never been built or operated in the U.S., rewriting or removing longstanding safety rules, and critically downsizing the agency. The drastic shift has sparked a mass exodus of seasoned experts, with over 400 staff members having left the NRC since the administration took office. Career officials warn that the incoming DOGE operatives lack basic nuclear policy experience and are actively undermining the independent safety culture that has prevented a major U.S. nuclear disaster since the accident at Three Mile Island Unit 2 in 1979 (conveniently renamed/rebranded recently to the Crane Clean Energy Center as efforts are underway to restart Unit 1, the other closed reactor at the site to power data centers for Microsoft).

The ProPublica report highlights several alarming internal incidents, like this particularly awful nugget:

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.

But one of the more disturbing revelations was buried a little further into the report:

An increasingly vocal group of industry voices and deregulation advocates have blamed the slow build-out on overly cautious and inefficient regulators. Among the most powerful exponents of this view are billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; both venture capitalists have their own investments in the nuclear energy sector and are influential Trump supporters.

Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, after Trump won the 2024 election, helping pick staff for the new administration. In late 2024, Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Peter Thiel, everyone’s favorite Antichrist-obsessed, nefarious billionaire, is handpicking his own regulator? While most may be more familiar with Thiel’s technocratic AI and surveillance ventures, very little has been reported about his desire to monopolize the fuel supply for an entire fleet of new nuclear reactors designed to use “nuclear weapons usable uranium.” 

General Matter, Thiel’s Uranium Enrichment startup, aims to supply High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) for new reactors by 2030, and they’ve already broken ground at their facility in Paducah, KY – backed with significant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) (aka – you the taxpayer). 

This should give everyone more pause than it has.

Before it was public knowledge that Thiel sought to supply “weapons-usable” uranium fuel to an entire fleet of new reactors, five of the world’s leading experts on nuclear safety and weapons proliferation warned the Biden Administration about the potential catastrophe with a new fleet of reactors designed to run on HALEU: 

The decision on how to handle HALEU domestically has crucial downstream consequences for global security. Were HALEU to become a standard reactor fuel without appropriate restrictions determined by an interagency security review, other countries would be able to obtain, produce, and process weapons-usable HALEU with impunity, eliminating the sharp distinction between peaceful and nonpeaceful nuclear programs. Such countries would be only days away from a bomb, giving the international community no warning of forthcoming nuclear proliferation and virtually no opportunity to prevent it. An unfettered HALEU policy leaves no margin of safety.

Wonderful. Thiel has set himself up to be the sole producer of weapons usable uranium to fuel experimental, unproven nuclear reactor designs (many of which are being pushed for by other billionaires), and hand-picked the regulator making sure he paints within the lines for a technology that can be catastrophically unforgiving. Nothing more to see here…

Hank Green explaining why there’s an incentive for power companies to build the most expensive plants they can get away with.

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) represents a comprehensive, independent assessment of international nuclear power developments. Find the annual reports here.

78-Year-Old Texas Shrimper Risks Life in Hunger Strike to Halt Dow’s Experimental Nuclear Reactor Plans

By The Nuclear Skeptic

Diane Wilson, a 78-year old, fourth-generation Texas shrimper, and leader of the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper (SABEW) is approaching her third week of a hunger strike outside Dow Chemical’s Seadrift manufacturing facility along the Texas gulf coast. On March 2nd, Wilson began protesting two simultaneous environmental threats posed by the corporation, the same company responsible for the worst environmental disaster in history: Dow’s Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. While she is fighting an unprecedented request by Dow to discharge plastic pollution into the San Antonio Bay estuary, Wilson also demands that Dow and partner X-energy immediately withdraw the company’s plans to build unshielded experimental nuclear reactors at the Seadrift facility. Wilson has stated unequivocally that she will not end her strike until her demands are met.

At the center of the growing controversy is Dow’s ambition to construct four “small” nuclear reactors on the Seadrift plastics site. The corporation is advancing this project through its subsidiary, Long Mott Energy LLC. Local activists, including Diane Wilson, are raising alarms due to the deeply experimental nature of the proposed reactors. According to the plans, the company is using a reactor design with no conventional steel-reinforced concrete containment structure, which stands in stark contrast to every existing U.S. nuclear plant. Furthermore, this specific nuclear reactor design has never been tested, licensed or built anywhere in the country.

Beyond the unproven reactor design, the project presents a severe long-term environmental hazard as the reactors would generate high-level nuclear waste. Because there is currently no licensed permanent repository for such dangerous, highly radioactive waste anywhere in the U.S., it  would have to be stored on-site at the Seadrift facility indefinitely. For local residents like Diane, adding a permanent nuclear waste dump to an already heavily industrialized coastline is an unacceptable risk. “Dow can’t keep plastic out of our bay,” Wilson said. “Now they want to run reactors that have never been built or licensed in this country, next to our waters near our homes, and that’s just crazy”.

To block the proposed nuclear development, SABEW has taken the fight directly to federal oversight agencies. Represented by the Austin-based law firm Perales, Allmon & Ice, PC, the group has successfully intervened before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. Through this legal intervention, SABEW is actively challenging Dow’s pending construction permit application, the first to be filed for such a reactor design. In conjunction with the hunger strike, Wilson’s demand letter makes clear that Dow must cancel all plans to build nuclear reactors at the site. It additionally requires that the corporation formally withdraw its construction permit application from the NRC.

The protest has already triggered physical confrontations with the chemical giant’s corporate security personnel. On March 9, when SABEW members attempted to deliver their formal demand letter to the facility’s site director, they were intercepted by Dow’s head of security, John Weitz. Weitz informed the group that interim director Thomas Welch had replaced former site director Heather Lyons, and offered to “handle” the letter himself. When SABEW insisted on delivery to a senior official, Weitz ordered them to stop video recording and told them they were on private property. He specifically threatened Wilson with arrest if she set foot on Dow property, citing her history of a 2002 action at the facility where she scaled an 80-foot chemical tower to unfurl a banner regarding the aforementioned deadly Bhopal disaster.

Shortly after this exchange, Calhoun County sheriff’s officers arrived. The authorities presented Wilson and a SABEW member with a formal order to sign, bearing Weitz’s name, stating that they would be arrested if found on Dow property. When the group requested a copy of the order they had been asked to sign, they were told they could not have one. Consequently, the demand letter is being sent directly to Fitterling at Dow’s headquarters in Midland, Michigan.

While the experimental nuclear reactors represent a massive future threat, they compound an existing environmental crisis. Dow’s Seadrift facility currently manufactures nurdles, pre-production plastic pellets used as raw material for consumer goods. Globally, an estimated one billion pounds of nurdles enter the oceans each year. SABEW has collected millions of these pellets around the facility, including millions collected in a single spot in the Victoria Barge Canal on New Year’s Eve 2025. Instead of upgrading pollution controls to meet its existing permit—which limits discharges to “trace amounts” of “floating solids”—Dow is asking the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to rewrite the rules. The company has proposed no replacement limit, seeking an unprecedented permit that would explicitly allow it to discharge plastics into the bay.

Despite the physical toll of her fast and the threat of legal retaliation, Wilson remains encamped. “This bay belongs to the people of Texas, not to Dow Chemical,” she said

HOW TO TAKE ACTION:

Diane and SABEW would like to invite all stakeholders to sign-on to her letter demanding their permit include zero discharge of plastics (pellets, powder, and flakes) from Dow’s Seadrift facility, and cancellation of its plans to build nuclear reactors. The sign-on is open to all organizations globally. There is no current deadline set as they plan to continue to send the letter with updated sign-ons until they receive a response or until the demands are met. Tell Dow to STOP NOW! Read the letter and sign-on here.