DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy Awards $19 Million to Advance Recycling of Used Nuclear Fuel

Projects to Spur Innovation to Drastically Reduce Nation's Nuclear Waste

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy today awarded over $19 million to five U.S. companies to research and develop recycling technologies for used nuclear fuel. Projects will support President Trump's bold and ambitious nuclear energy agenda by helping to maximize reliable power production, end U.S. reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium, and drastically reducing the volume of used fuel stored across the country.

"Used nuclear fuel is an incredible untapped resource in the United States," said Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish. "The Trump Administration is taking a common-sense approach to making sure we're using our resources in the most efficient ways possible to secure American energy independence and fuel our economic growth."

Less than five percent of the potential energy in the nation's nuclear fuel is extracted after five years of operation in a commercial reactor. Recycling used nuclear fuel could increase resource utilization by 95 percent, reduce waste by 90 percent, and decrease the amount of uranium needed to operate nuclear reactors.

Additional benefits to nuclear fuel recycling include the recovery and extraction of valuable radioisotopes for medical, industrial, and defense purposes. 

The following companies were selected to help solve the economic and technological challenges associated with nuclear fuel recycling technologies that also meet the nation's strict nonproliferation standards and national security goals:

• Alpha Nur Inc. will research and validate a process that will recover highly enriched uranium (HEU) from used nuclear fuel produced by U.S. based research reactors and transform it to a usable high assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU) form for reuse in small modular reactor designs.
• Curio Solutions, LLC will develop a process designed to produce uranium hexafluoride gas from used fuel.
• Flibe Energy Inc. will study the use of electrochemical methods to process used nuclear fuel.
• Oklo Inc. will study heavy element deposition in molten salt to optimize a pyro-processing plant design.
• Shine Technologies, LLC will develop a process design that incorporates transport, storage, and disposal together with hydro-processing of used fuel.

The projects will last up to three years and require a minimum 20 percent cost share from each award recipient.

Today's awards support two recent presidential executive orders by President Trump to deploy advanced reactor technologies for national security and to reinvigorate the domestic nuclear industrial base by evaluating and advancing recycling technologies that can be leveraged by future reprocessing and recycling facilities in the United States.

Learn more about DOE's support of used nuclear fuel recycling research.