Clean tech startup Fluxnium found a way to tap 50,000 years worth of nuclear fuel
The U.S. has ambitious plans to triple the capacity of its nuclear power plants by 2050, but that goal might hit a roadblock if plant operators can’t buy fuel at reasonable prices. Prices for yellowcake, a form of unrefined uranium, are up 75% in the last five years, according to the U.S. Further complicating matters, the U.S. doesn’t have significant resources within its borders — unless you consider the ocean.
- ▪The U.S. has ambitious plans to triple the capacity of its nuclear power plants by 2050, but that goal might hit a roadblock if plant operators can’t buy fuel at reasonable prices.
- ▪Prices for yellowcake, a form of unrefined uranium, are up 75% in the last five years, according to the U.S.
- ▪Further complicating matters, the U.S. doesn’t have significant resources within its borders — unless you consider the ocean.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/clean-tech-startup-fluxnium-found-a-way-to-tap-50000-years-worth-of-nuclear-fuel/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T13:03:41.305Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T13:03:41.305Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | GYRQGlOnbkgO · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The U.S. has ambitious plans to triple the capacity of its nuclear power plants by 2050, but that goal might hit a roadblock if plant operators can’t buy fuel at reasonable prices. Prices for yellowcake, a form of unrefined uranium, are up 75% in the last five years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Further complicating matters, the U.S. doesn’t have significant resources within its borders — unless you consider the ocean. The ocean has over 4 billion metric tons of uranium in it, enough for 50,000 years or so. “It’s like a thousand times more than all identified hard rock mines combined,” Jeff Green, founder and CEO of the clean tech Fluxnium, told TechCrunch. Fluxnium thinks it has solved the problem of how to extract uranium from seawater.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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