CURIE program to promote used nuclear fuel recycling
S. Himmelstein | March 17, 2022Up to $48 million in funding is being allocated by the U.S. Department of Energy for a new U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program that will support the deployment of advanced nuclear reactor (AR) technology by providing safe and sustainable domestic fuel stocks. The Converting Used Nuclear Fuel (UNF) Radioisotopes Into Energy (CURIE) program focuses on substantially reducing the disposal impact of UNF and supporting a comprehensive national strategy to deal with waste safely and securely.
The initiative seeks to enable commercially viable reprocessing of UNF from the current light water reactor (LWR) fleet by resolving key gaps and barriers in reprocessing technologies, process monitoring and facility design. Actinides in LWR UNF would ideally be reprocessed into feedstock to fuel ARs while other commercially valuable materials would be harvested for industrial and medical uses.
The U.S. has accumulated approximately 86,000 metric tons of UNF from LWRs, a value that increases by approximately 2,000 tons per year. This UNF is destined for permanent disposal even though more than 90% of its energy remains.
The program is part of the ARPA-E strategy to manage and reduce the HLW waste inventory. Source: ARPA-E
Projects funded under CURIE will develop innovative separations technologies, process monitoring techniques for special nuclear material, and equipment designs that will significantly improve the economics and process monitoring of reprocessing technologies while dramatically reducing the volume of high-level waste (HLW) from LWR UNF requiring disposal.
Selected projects must:
- Reduce the volume of LWR HLW requiring permanent disposal by at least an order of magnitude. Reductions in volume can be achieved multiple ways, including by reconstituting UNF cladding and fission products into commercial products, accounting for reductions in future production of HLW due to the use of recycled material, or other means.
- Maintain disposal costs in the range of 0.1¢/kWh.
- Provide a 1¢/kWh fuel cost for a 200 metric tons heavy metal/year nth-of-a-kind (NOAK) facility. This cost metric is defined in the context of a hypothetical advanced reactor with a 200 MWe capacity and 100,000 MWdt burnup. Developing a cost-competitive reprocessing technology would minimize the production of further HLW by developing a commercial market for reprocessed materials, while stabilizing AR fueling with a domestic material source.
- Enable UNF separations that do not produce pure plutonium streams. Separations that develop a co-recovered actinide product would represent a lower proliferation risk and are consistent with CURIE program goals of increasing the overall proliferation resistance of reprocessing technologies and products.
Well, it's about time the nuclear waste problem is taken more seriously. I've noticed that every time a new design of a nuclear power plant is presented, the waste disposal isn't mentioned or just slid over. The nuclear waste has more potential to harm the earth than global warming. However, a big enough nuclear disaster would eliminate global warming because there wouldn't be enough people around to do much polluting. Although recycling reduces the amount of nuclear waste, it doesn't eliminate it. It only slows the rate of the pile of nuclear waste. Maybe the fusion reactors that make their on fuel and, therefore, have no nuclear waste are really just "4" years away. The dual-fuel reactor may be a stop gap method to reduce nuclear waste. If it costs more per kwh, the real value may make it worth it. We should use those until the fusion reactors are developed. It's going to take a lot of energy to convert seawater into potable water.