We were going to bury 20 tons of nuclear fuel. Finally, we have a way to use it instead.

For most of this century, the U.S. has run roughly one-fifth of its electricity on fuel it must import. Russia has long been the single largest foreign supplier of enriched uranium to U.S. nuclear plants. Remarkably, it still held that position as recently as last year, providing 20 percent of the enriched uranium in America’s commercial reactors even after a U.S. import ban became law.

We have spent years scrambling to unwind that dependence — a chokepoint that constrains today’s reactors and the pending advanced ones. And this month, the Department of Energy took a step toward loosening that chokepoint. Its efforts deserve a fair hearing rather than a reflexive flinch.

The department has selected five advanced nuclear companies — Oklo, Exodys Energy, SHINE Technologies, Standard Nuclear, and Flibe Energy — for advanced negotiations under its new Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program. The idea is to take nearly 20 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium left over from dismantled Cold War warheads and convert it into fuel for advanced reactors.

The negotiations are not final yet. However, the premise must be defended now, because the criticism has already arrived. And the criticism has a point — any honest case for this program has to address it.

Critics point out that the U.S. already tried to turn surplus weapons plutonium into reactor fuel. The MOX fuel facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina ran for years, consumed billions of taxpayer dollars, and was ultimately canceled in 2018 before producing any commercial fuel, with its expected price tag........

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