Seth Cohen of Mavria: nuclear waste is an asset, not a liability — and governors are fighting to host it
Jul 23, 2026 with Seth Cohen
Key Points
- Twenty-seven governors applied to host Mavria's Nuclear Lifecycle Campus, with several now competing to attract spent fuel processing as an economic asset rather than fight it as waste.
- The U.S. holds roughly 100,000 tons of commercial spent fuel containing energy reserves four times larger than Saudi Arabia's proven oil reserves, yet Cohen says Mavria is not focused on energy recovery.
- Cohen argues data center siting has become the second critical bottleneck to AI deployment in the U.S., requiring the same narrative reframing that made nuclear waste politically desirable.
Summary
Seth Cohen, Mavria
Seth Cohen arrived at AMD's Advancing AI event as a portfolio company founder backed by AMP Capital's Anjney Midha — and as the former chief counsel of nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he served as one of two DOGE operatives responsible for implementing the president's nuclear executive orders across the federal government. Before that, he was a Supreme Court and appellate litigator at Kirkland & Ellis. Mavria, his AI infrastructure company, remains in stealth.
“We shifted the narrative and went from Yucca Mountain being the only place where you could put aisles of waste, completely off limits, to where we are now. 27 governors applied for this program that Adam and I started called the Nuclear Lifecycle Campus. And there are — I can't tell you the exact number, but it fits on two hands — the number of governors currently fighting to host the full back end fuel cycle.”
Nuclear waste as a location asset
The sharpest claim Cohen makes is that nuclear waste has crossed a political threshold. He and his DOE co-lead Adam Blake — now his co-founder at Mavria — designed a program called the Nuclear Lifecycle Campus, and 27 governors applied to participate. A handful, he says, are now actively competing to host the full back-end fuel cycle. Tennessee made its application public. Cohen frames this as a deliberate narrative shift: turning something treated as a liability for 60 years into a site-selection asset governors are willing to stake their names on.
The underlying energy argument is striking. The United States has roughly 100,000 tons of commercial spent fuel sitting on reactor pads. Cohen says about 97% of the potential energy remains in a rod after it's removed from a reactor — and that the total energy stored in those pads exceeds Saudi Arabia's proven oil reserves by a factor of four. Commercial spent fuel typically enters the reactor at 3.5–5% of the useful isotope and exits at around 0.7%, leaving substantial energy potential in the material. But Cohen says that energy recovery isn't where Mavria is focused — at least not now.
The data center problem
Cohen pivots from nuclear to what he describes as the second bottleneck to AI deployment: the inability to site data centers at scale in the United States. He argues data centers face significant public opposition and are critical national assets that need a narrative shift similar to the one he engineered for nuclear waste — making communities want to host them rather than fight them.
He is deliberately vague about Mavria's specific product, citing stealth mode. What is clear is that the company operates at the intersection of federal policy experience, nuclear infrastructure, and AI compute deployment — and that Midha at AMP Capital made Mavria one of its bets on solving the energy and siting constraints on the US AI build-out.
Cohen committed to returning to the show when Mavria comes out of stealth.
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