⚛️ Plutonium is good, actually

Since the first American nuclear power plant came online at the end of 1957, reactors had been built as bespoke, billion-dollar behemoths, designed to pump out hundreds of megawatts of electricity to offset the high up-front construction costs with greater economies of scale. 

Oklo, the no-revenue $12 billion nuclear power startup, is trying to take a different approach, with smaller “microreactors” making it easier to ramp up power.  

• What really makes Oklo stand apart is the design of the reactor. Rather than using water as a coolant like all of the 94 commercial reactors in operation in the US, Oklo intends to use liquid sodium metal. With a coolant that could reach much higher temperatures, Oklo could burn through more of the toxic material that makes the half-life of nuclear waste take centuries to decay.

• Sherwood reported about a fascinating new play in that strategy: while American enrichment companies scramble to build the supply chain for the high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel for these next-generation reactor startups, Oklo thinks it has come up with another option: plutonium.

• During the Cold War bomb-making era, the US government stockpiled plutonium for use in atomic weapons, and still has tons of the stuff lying around. Its long-lived radioactive waste makes plutonium particularly toxic. And Oklo revealed it wants to use that extra plutonium in storage to power its reactors.  

The US Department of Energy had planned to take as much as 20 metric tons of plutonium, mix it with sand and kitty litter, and bury the material in the desert in New Mexico.The agency halted its disposal process in May, and in August, the Energy Department announced a program to make the material available for reactor companies. 

The Takeaway

Oklo is in the running to get some. Depending on how much plutonium the company can secure, it could produce enough fuel to generate 2.5 gigawatts of electricity, equal to the power demands of nearly 2.5 million American households.

There are other potential sources of plutonium, too. The United Kingdom is planning to dilute and bury its stockpile. Japan, meanwhile, has its own inventory in storage. Between the two countries is as much as 150 tons of material, representing potentially another 10 to 16 gigawatts.

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As the wellness industry surges, a wave of startups are building sleek apps that reinterpret lab results, often using them as a funnel to sell treatments. 

Behind nearly all of them sits Quest, a decidedly non-startup company that has been publicly traded for nearly three decades. Quest quietly processes the samples while the startups build businesses on top of the data.

• These businesses sell memberships that come with lab tests — typically blood draws — that are done at Quest locations. Then an AI-powered, clinician-reviewed app analyzes the results and recommends action plans. 

• While the words “startup” and “blood testing” may conjure images of Theranos, the fraudulent company founded by Elizabeth Holmes that promised to run dozens of tests from a single drop of blood, the testing here is real. It’s the interpretation and upselling that are new.

• Quest’s own direct-to-consumer channel grew 30% to 40% on a year-to-date basis as of the third quarter of 2025.

Startups rely on companies like Quest or Labcorp because of their national footprint. Even as the industry looks toward at-home blood collection as the next frontier, the technology remains difficult to execute. Current at-home kits are generally considered less accurate than in-clinic draws and detect a narrower range of biomarkers.

The Takeaway

It’s a somewhat funny situation, where med tech companies spend a fortune on splashy branding, accumulate customers eager to optimize their health and lifestyle, immerse them in all kinds of tracking and monitoring tech, and then, when it’s time to launch a blood-testing business, just put their own branding on top of Quest or Labcorp, two boring but reliable businesses that have resisted disruption only because boring but reliable tends to go a long way in medicine.

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Discount stores are having a moment 

Everyone loves a deal in 2025 — and Aldi, Walmart, and Dollar Tree are all cashing in. It’s not just for boring must-haves like toilet paper and pantry staples, either: in Walmart’s third-quarter earnings, executives outlined a croissant craze that led the retailer to “remove the shelf” for the baked goods. Another unexpected shift is the increasing proclivity of richer cohorts to hunt for bargains. Here’s who’s shopping where.

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Snacks Shots

• 🏈 NFL: This week’s Thursday Night Football matchup is a game with major playoff implications as two titans of the NFC West — both playoff-bound at the current standings — take on one another, with the Seattle Seahawks narrowly favored* (51% to 49%) over the conference-leading Los Angeles Rams. 

• 🥊 Boxing: This Friday, internet impresario Jake Paul will take on Anthony Joshua in the ring at the Kaseya Center in a bout that will be broadcast on Netflix. Joshua is the heavy favorite, with the markets pricing in an 87% chance of victory for the two-time heavyweight champion over the YouTube personality turned boxer.

• 🏛️ Government: FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino was reported as planning an exit from his position in the Trump administration, sending the market-implied chances of his departure rising sharply from 7% at the beginning of the week to 83% as of yesterday evening. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.