Closing the Loop: Building the Commercial Infrastructure for Nuclear Fuel Recycling

U.S. electricity demand is climbing at a pace not seen in decades. Nuclear energy can help meet that growth, but the industry faces a bottleneck: today’s "open cycle" treats nuclear fuel as single-use waste rather than a high-value resource.

The resource is substantial. Used nuclear fuel still contains a vast majority of its original energy potential, and the laboratory chemistry for recovering it is well established. The harder challenge is commercialization: building the infrastructure needed to license, secure and operate a recycling facility at scale.

SHINE is developing the technology and targeting a plant capable of recycling used nuclear fuel. Several collaborations funded by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) CURIE program are helping move that work from proven chemistry toward commercial-scale fuel recycling.

Solving for Commercialization

Getting there requires more than a chemistry breakthrough. It means designing a process that can be licensed, safeguarded, tracked and operated economically. The ARPA-E CURIE collaborations help turn that broad challenge into practical work, from how the chemistry performs inside the plant to how material is monitored and what regulators would need to review.

1. Establishing Bankable Safeguards (Licensing & Security)

Commercial recycling requires a facility that can meet licensing, security and compliance requirements from the start.

• EPRI. We joined the EPRI-led consortium building a Model for the Assessment of Reprocessing and Recycle with Innovative Execution (MARIE), an optimization tool the industry could use to evaluate and underwrite the first commercial used fuel recycling facilities. We are contributing on safeguards-by-design, licensing cost and isotope market potential, drawing on our experience licensing Chrysalis.
• GE Vernova. As a subcontractor on the GE Vernova-led Monochromatic Assays Yielding Enhanced Reliability (MAYER) project, we are developing AI-powered sensors that track and measure nuclear material in real time. Automating accountability can reduce the manual sampling, redundant instrumentation, and inventory shutdowns that drive operating cost.

2. Driving Process Profitability (Recovery & Waste)

Much of recycling’s cost lies in the chemistry involved, which is also where some of the biggest gains are available. We are targeting the steps that recover more material with less processing.

• Argonne National Laboratory and Case Western Reserve University. We are adapting Argonne’s PaCERS technology, Packed Centrifugal Equipment for Radiochemical Separation, to our process. This enables faster, more efficient recovery of minor actinides, effectively turning what is currently a waste-disposal burden into a manageable, stable byproduct.

From Unwanted Waste to Renewable Resource

Each of these projects supports the economics we are building into REDUCE (Recover Elements, Destroy Undesirables, Create Energy), our three-step recycling process. By refining licensing, lowering chemical costs, and increasing isotope extraction, we are building a commercial framework that works.

Recycling can transform used nuclear fuel from unwanted waste into a renewable resource for generating power that can help meet growing demand.

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Sources:

• https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264
• https://cleanpower.org/news/us-national-power-demand-study/
• https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press582.php

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