Nuclear Waste Has No Home, and AI Agents Are Coming for White-Collar Jobs

Nuclear energy is having a moment. Public approval is up, politicians on both sides of the aisle are on board, and Big Tech is writing checks to fuel its insatiable electricity appetite. But there’s a problem nobody wants to talk about at parties: the waste.

Every year, US reactors produce about 2,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste. And we still have nowhere permanent to put it. That’s not a new problem — it’s been festering for decades — but the renewed interest in nuclear makes it urgent in a way it wasn’t before. Casey Crownhart has a solid breakdown of what’s at stake over at The Spark, MIT’s climate newsletter. Worth a read if you care about where all that spent fuel actually ends up.

On the AI front, Will Douglas Heaven makes a point that’s been rattling around my head for a while: when people talk about AI transforming industries, what they really mean is agents. ChatGPT proved AI can talk. But talking doesn’t change the world. Doing stuff does.

The real leap comes when you get multiple agents working together — coordinating roles, passing tasks, handling complex workflows. Apps like Codex and Claude Cowork are early glimpses. Heaven compares it to the assembly line for white-collar work. That’s a bold claim, but not an unreasonable one. The risks, of course, scale with the ambition. When agents start operating inside real systems, mistakes stop being amusing chat hiccups and start being real problems.

Agent orchestration is one of MIT Technology Review’s “10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now.” They’re unpacking one item from that list each day. This one’s worth following.

Also in the newsletter: Stephen Ornes writes about a wild turn in synthetic biology. In 2019, a group of scientists proposed building “mirror” bacteria — microbes with proteins and sugars that are mirror images of natural ones. The idea was to unlock new insights into cell construction, drug design, maybe even the origins of life. Now many of those same researchers have reversed course. They’ve become convinced that mirror organisms could trigger a catastrophic event threatening all life on Earth. That’s not hyperbole — they’re genuinely worried. The story is also available as an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, if you prefer to hear it while doing dishes.

A quick note from the must-reads: Elon Musk testified for the first time yesterday in the OpenAI trial, claiming Sam Altman “stole a charity.” That trial is shaping up to be one of the more consequential legal showdowns in tech. I’ll be watching how it unfolds.