- Swiss start-up Transmutex's technology reduces long-term radioactive waste.
- The technology could further encourage AI companies to use nuclear energy for their data centers.
- “Only nuclear power can meet this huge energy demand,” the Transmutex CEO told BI.
Ancient alchemists once tried transmuting elements, tinkering with metals like lead to create gold. This attempt to make quick money has since been abandoned, but scientists are now using similar ideas to level up one of the world's most promising energy sources.
Swiss start-up Transmutex is developing a new method of “transmutation” that not only destroys nuclear waste but also turns it back into energy, solving a key problem in atomic energy production.
Scientists have long considered nuclear energy to be one of the cleanest and most reliable ways to produce energy. But the waste it produces must be stored deep underground for thousands of years to prevent the environment from being exposed to harmful radiation. Transmutex says its technology can “transmute” 99 percent of the world's high-level radioactive waste into new fuel.
In a letter to the company last month, Nagra, the Swiss agency that manages nuclear waste, acknowledged the claim as a “theoretical possibility”.
But Switzerland has since pivoted away from nuclear energy, in part due to safety concerns revealed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. But such disasters are rare, and many other countries, including the United States and Saudi Arabia, are betting on nuclear energy as the most efficient and sustainable option.
“To reach our net-zero goal by 2050, we need to at least triple our current nuclear generating capacity,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in May.
Technology companies at the forefront of the AI revolution are also turning to nuclear energy to power their vast AI data centers.
Transmutex CEO Franklin Serban Schreiber believes his company can help these companies go nuclear by destroying their long-term waste.
“If we know how to dispose of the waste, even if it takes a long time, we know there's a limit to how much waste there is in the future, and it won't take a million years. That's the key,” he told Business Insider in an interview.
New fuel cycle for nuclear power generation
Transmutex's technology uses high-energy subatomic particles called neutrons to destroy highly radioactive nuclear waste. It can take hundreds of thousands of years for nuclear waste to decay to safe levels of radiation, but Transmutex says it can reduce that time to just a few decades.
Over time, Selvan Schreiber said the system could also turn the waste into fuel that can be reused in nuclear power plants — a kind of nuclear recycling program.
“Overall, the process is very profitable because you can burn the waste and release energy,” Cameron Porter, a venture capitalist who runs Steel Atlas and is an investor in Transmutex, told Business Insider.
Nuclear physicists say the company's technology avoids one of the biggest concerns about nuclear energy: that the same fuel used to power nuclear power plants could also be used to make nuclear weapons.
“We don't want that to happen,” Andrey Afanasev, a physics professor at George Washington University's Institute of Nuclear Studies, told Business Insider.
Transmutex avoids this risk because it does not produce plutonium, a key element in making nuclear bombs.
Afanasiev said the technology is also more efficient: Spent nuclear fuel can retain about 90 percent of its potential energy after five years of operation in a reactor, according to the Energy Ministry.
With nuclear reactors, “you're just wasting a big chunk of energy that everyone could use,” he said. “This technology addresses that problem. You get more energy out of the fuel you have.”
AI companies seeking energy solutions
As the race to develop artificial intelligence intensifies, the AI industry is looking for new, more reliable power sources.
“The biggest bottleneck to advances in AI is not compute, it's energy,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the Dwarkesh Podcast in April, referring to the computing resources needed to train and run AI models.
Oklo, a startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is focused on nuclear power through small reactors, including its Aurora reactor, which can run on spent nuclear waste.
Selvan Schreiber said nuclear power may be the only way to support the industry's huge energy needs.
“AI requires huge, industrial-scale energy,” says Serban Schreiber. “Only nuclear power can provide a stable supply of this massive energy demand. With a technology like Transmutex (there is only one proposed today), the US could build traditional uranium-based nuclear plants like Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia and not be stuck with high-level radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years.”
