DOE awards $19M to advance SNF recycling

The Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy awarded more than $19 million to five U.S. companies-Alpha Nur, Curio Solutions, Flibe Energy, Oklo, and Shine Technologies-to research and develop recycling technologies for spent nuclear fuel (SNF).

According to DOE-NE, the projects will support President Trump's goal of curtailing U.S. reliance on foreign sources of enriched uranium while reducing the volume of SNF stored across the country. Projects are to last up to three years and will require a minimum 20 percent cost share from each award recipient.

"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."

Project details: According to DOE-NE, the selected companies will help solve the economic and technological challenges associated with nuclear fuel recycling technologies while meeting strict nonproliferation standards and national security goals.

Announced on February 5, the projects include the following:

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

Company profiles: Last September, both Curio and Oklo announced progress in building up recycling capacity using different proprietary technologies.

Based in California, Oklo plans to design, build, and operate a spent fuel recycling facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. According to the company, the recycling facility will be part of a $1.68 billion advanced fuel center and will reprocess SNF into fresh fuel for fast reactors using electrorefining-based pyroprocessing. Oklo expects to begin producing metal fuel for its Aurora Powerhouse fast reactor, which the company plans to build at Idaho National Laboratory by the early 2030s.

Washington, D.C.-based Curio, with support from the DOE's ARPA-E CURIE program and GAIN voucher initiative, has completed laboratory-scale demonstrations of its NuCycle voloxidation processing technology. The company is targeting a demonstration of its pilot-scale NuCycle modules by the fourth quarter of 2027.

In 2023, Shine announced it was in early engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license a spent fuel recycling facility at the company's campus in Janesville, Wis. It intends to build a 50,000-square-foot facility capable of recycling up to 200 metric tons of spent fuel a year using a modified plutonium uranium reduction extraction (PUREX) separation process called codecontamination (CoDCon). A liquid-liquid process, CoDCon is to provide proliferation resistance by keeping a portion of separated uranium in combination with the plutonium.

Based in Huntsville, Ala., Flibe Energy is working on two SMR designs: the lithium fluoride low-enriched uranium reactor and the lithium fluoride thorium reactor.

Alpha Nur, meanwhile, is a nuclear energy start-up founded in 2021 by then University of Chicago undergraduates Kevin O'Sullivan and Mason Rodriguez Rand.