The Department of Energy (DOE) has ramped up efforts to explore recycling spent nuclear fuel (SNF), or used nuclear fuel (UNF), from the nation’s fleet of light water reactors (LWRs), doling out $38 million in federal awards to a dozen projects on Oct. 21.
Teams will receive funding under the DOE’s March 2022–launched “Converting UNF Radioisotopes Into Energy” (CURIE) program to work on projects that will advance recycling of SNF. The projects will seek to reduce the volume of high-level waste (HLW) that will require permanent disposal, but they will also potentially provide feedstock that could be used in domestic advanced reactors, the DOE said.
The awards represent a pivotal advancement for the nation’s emerging strategy to deal with SNF from its fleet of LWRs, most of which is in temporary storage, awaiting final disposition. So far, the nuclear industry has safely stored 88,500 metric tons of commercial SNF and HLW in spent fuel pools and dry casks at 76 operating and decommissioned reactor sites in 35 states, but many experts believe that approach is highly inefficient and unsustainable. Driven by disposition uncertainties and concerns about future advanced nuclear reactor fuel supplies, the federal funding institutes new momentum for commercial SNF reprocessing, which the agency hopes will be economically viable and proliferation-resistant.
A Renewed Effort to Explore a Closed Nuclear Cycle
The efforts diverge from the U.S’s long-held ambitions to deal with SNF disposition through direct disposal in a geologic repository designed to contain residual hazards for 100,000 years or more. Owing in part to a political deadlock in Congress, and the DOE’s decades-long default on a “standard contract” to begin disposing of SNF as required by the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), geologic disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, has ground to a halt. The DOE recently began implementing a consent-based siting process for an interim storage facility. These approaches, however, cater to a once-through fuel cycle.
While not yet part of a formal nuclear waste strategy, the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s (ARPA-E’s) CURIE program has set out to explore a closed nuclear cycle by enabling commercially viable reprocessing of SNF from the current LWR fleet. CURIE envisions that if key gaps or barriers are resolved in reprocessing technologies, process monitoring, and facility design, commercial reprocessing could thrive. The program posits that SNF reprocessing to recover reusable actinides and recycling them into new fuel has the potential “to improve fuel utilization—especially when coupled with advanced fast reactors—and drastically reduce the volume of HLW requiring disposal.”
The measure is notable because while the U.S. has explored reprocessing for decades—starting with World War II-era Manhattan Project’s recovery of plutonium from irradiated metallic uranium fuel discharged from the Hanford production reactors—commercial reprocessing attempts have encountered technical, economic, and regulatory issues. And though the U.S. has for decades mulled the reprocessing option as a potential pathway forward, nuclear waste research priorities in recent years have fluctuated under different administrations (see sidebar, “Reprocessing’s Re-Emergence as a Nuclear Waste Pathway”).
Reprocessing’s Re-Emergence as a Nuclear Waste PathwayThe U.S. government originally developed reprocessing technology as part… |
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