Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, February 16th.

Today on Forbes, this startup wants to turn America's nuclear waste into power.

Staff Sheehan, CEO and founder of Project Omega, is explaining how his latest company started.

He says, quote, buying uranium is suspiciously easy. It shows up in a

UPS truck. You can Google it. With Project Omega, Sheehan, a Forbes under 30 alum and serial founder,

is taking on one of America's most persistent energy problems, nuclear waste. Some 100,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored in more than 100 sites across the country,

in purified water pools, as well as steel and concrete casks, the byproduct of more than half

a century's worth of nuclear power.

And as utilities, government, and industry, turn to nuclear energy to meet AI's seemingly

unquenchable thirst for electricity, that backlog of unused spent fuel is going to grow.

And though the fuel still contains more than 90% of its inherent energy, the U.S. lacks the means to

recycle it.

Cheyenne thinks that's a wasted opportunity, and he's built Project Omega to exploit it.

The company is emerging from stealth with $12 million in funding, info it shared exclusively

with Forbes at an estimated $50 million valuation, though that was before the company

had a working prototype.

The round was led by Starship Ventures with participation from Mantis Ventures, Decisive Point,

and Slow Ventures. The government is involved as well, through a contract from ARPA-E,

or the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy.

Unlike other nuclear fuel companies, Rhode Island-based Project Omega takes a consumer approach to nuclear waste recycling, aiming to turn the power isotopes in nuclear waste into long-life

batteries that people and the government can use. It was a natural product of Sheehan's long-running interest in clean power

and background in heavy metal chemistry.

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