Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-waste-reprocessing-transmutation

by rbanffy • 1 year ago

120 152 1 year ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented. Natural uranium isn't very expensive and separating the plutonium from spent fuel doesn't save much on waste disposal costs either. The US canceled a new MOX plant just 7 years ago due to cost and schedule problems:

https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...

Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.

The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:

https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-02/company-developing-pa...

The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.

deepsun4• 1 year ago

Also, nuclear waste is a very small problem, compared to other wastes. Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.

In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.

potato3732842• 1 year ago

10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic forever.

throw0101d3• 1 year ago

Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.

For some definition of "active".

The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.

I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.

cameldrv• 1 year ago

The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.

benlivengood• 1 year ago

We can't even agree to keep under 2°C warming in 100 years, so I am also confused about why people are worried about waste that lasts 10K years. My guess is that they actually worry it will be leaked during their lifetime, whereas they know X° warming is beyond their lifetime.

whycome3• 1 year ago

It’s a constant heat producer. Can’t we use it just for that? Store it somewhere and transfer the heat with traditional liquid cooling/heat exchanger methods? Store it up in the permafrost regions. Heat greenhouses.

toomuchtodo4• 1 year ago

I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.

If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.

(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

philipkglass4• 1 year ago

Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.

AngryData4• 1 year ago

Theoretically yes, but you seriously complicate the storage of nuclear materials when you start packing it all together and trying to create heat or keep it at any elevated temperature for harvesting heat. That is basically the entire concept of a nuclear reactor, except now its either a random mash of nuclear stuff unless you spend a ton of money categorizing and actively monitoring the state of all the material put in, but with a less robust cooling system than an actual nuke plant and far lower output.

With the expenses involved with all of that, it would probably be better to just build multiple geothermal plants instead and you don't have to worry about nuclear materials at all for similar power output.

To me the only 2 economically feasible strategies I see with high level nuclear waste is recycling with some sort of breeder reactor program, or dumping it in a deep stable hole that is trapped away from any water tables on the order of 100,000 years or more, by which point it will just be a uniquely rich and and diverse nuclear mineral deposit.

With a breeder reactor though and all the supporting nuclear reprocessing facilities, even though it would be a lot of work and money, it would be recovering the vast majority of potential energy from previously mined and refined nuclear materials that you are talking about recovering heat from, and in a far more controlled manner that allows us to just chuck the material into pretty much any other reactor without any significant modifications.

credit_guy• 1 year ago

Many of the proposed new designs use higher enriched uranium, with up to 20% U-235. I expect that if they could work with 5% they would, but they can't. So from here I conclude that their waste might contain a much higher level of U-235 than the current PWRs, for example 3-5%. This would make it good for burning in a PWR, but of course, you need to first clean it up, and that requires processing.

CGMthrowaway2• 1 year ago

Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented.

All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.

toomuchtodo4• 1 year ago

Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...

Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.

(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)

Matticus_Rex3• 1 year ago

Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?

And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).

numpad0• 1 year ago

Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive

Isn't this, though certainly not intentionally, just reiterating that lawful high tech labor fundamentally has no place in modern globalized economy? [Manufacturing iPhone] from [externally sourced parts] into [complete phones] has been economically unattractive everywhere, too.

natmaka9• 1 year ago

The US canceled a new MOX plant

For nations devoid of uranium reserves and not absolutely sure to always be able to secure uranium supply (i.e. not a superpower) recycling is an interesting way.

Case in point: France.

FilosofumRex2• 1 year ago

Does anyone know of a good engineering level reference on Silex/GLE or general/commercial scale laser based separation. Most search results just show descriptive write ups.

philipkglass4• 1 year ago

I think that the Wikipedia article is about as good as it gets, because the process details are classified:

In June 2001, the U.S. Department of Energy classified "certain privately generated information concerning an innovative isotope separation process for enriching uranium". Under the Atomic Energy Act, all information not specifically declassified is classified as Restricted Data, whether it is privately or publicly held. This is in marked distinction to the national security classification executive order, which states that classification can only be assigned to information "owned by, produced by or for, or is under the control of the United States Government". This is the only known case of the Atomic Energy Act being used in such a manner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...

The United States developed the somewhat related AVLIS process to industrial readiness for the Special Isotope Separation project to produce high-grade weapons plutonium from old reactor fuel. However, it was ready just in time for the end of the Cold War, so it got shut down in 1990.

https://inis.iaea.org/records/r6yew-5nk17

Construction and operation of a Special Isotope Separation (SIS) project using the Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) process technology at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) near Idaho Falls, Idaho are proposed. The SIS project would process fuel-grade plutonium administered by the Department of Energy (DOE) into weapon-grade plutonium using AVLIS and supporting chemical processes.

vavooom• 1 year ago

"The company will separate out valuable isotopes such as Strontium-90, which has fuel applications in marine and aerospace engineering, and use neutrons to transmute the rest into shorter-lived isotopes"

From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

Strontium is taken up by the body like Calcium, as it's in the same group in the periodic table.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I don’t think anyone is considering its ingestion. At least I hope not, but these are very strange times.

wffurr• 1 year ago

Oh boy more “Infinity Rooms”. Funny write up on the hazards of reprocessing: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-own-radiat...

Eric_WVGG• 1 year ago

Nice

I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”

duskwuff• 1 year ago

A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.

(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)

itishappy• 1 year ago

I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.

yk• 1 year ago

I'm confused the article sometimes talks sometimes about transmutation, that is turning problematic isotopes into ones with shorter half life and theoretically gaining energy in the process, and sometimes about reprocessing, taking spent fuel and essentially recycling to get usable fuel again.

lucidguppy• 1 year ago

Oh look at this nuclear power ... no stop looking at solar and batteries! That would actually solve the problem!

AngryData4• 1 year ago

There are still a lot of obstacles to solve with going to base solar power. But I agree we should still be investing into it. However nuclear power is an all but completely solved problem and it has huge benefits in scaling with additional nuclear industries, where as solar has (perhaps minor, perhaps not) obstacles towards massive scaling. If we wanted to guarantee clean energy production into the future, I still think nuclear is a right choice. Maybe in 30-40 years solar will have solved all its problems and be built enough to stand on its own and we don't need any more nuke plants built, but we don't really know that will be true.

It is always best to plant the trees now and then not need to harvest them later rather than not plant them now and then not have them when you do need them.

crote4• 1 year ago

The problem with nuclear is the price. As someone else already brought up[0], nuclear is about four times as expensive as solar - and that's pretty much the best case scenario. Try to use nuclear as a peaker plants and it's going to be closer to forty times as expensive, simply because the cost of nuclear is dominated by the construction loan.

A lot of solar's problems magically disappear when you apply a nuclear-level budget to it. Less output during cloudy days? Build twice as many panels and you've solved it while still remaining cheaper than nuclear. What about night? Build wind turbines, hydro storage, and batteries Windless, dark winter nights? You've got a massive budget for a handful of 99.9%-idle fossil peaker plants with carbon capture.

Nuclear is a technological solution to an economical problem. It's sexy, but it doesn't solve anything.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515401

NooneAtAll3• 1 year ago

eh? they are different niches tho?

solar is intermittents, nuclear is base load

epistasis10• 1 year ago

The thing that surprises me about nuclear power is the huge amount of enthusiasm right now, without technological wins that might inspire such enthusiasm.

If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.

Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.

The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.

kulahan2• 1 year ago

The enthusiasm is very easy to understand.

Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

Geothermal: regionally locked

Wind: unpredictable

Hydro: all the good spots are already being used

Coal/oil/gas: too dirty

Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?

mlyle6• 1 year ago

Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.

We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.

Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.

epistasis10• 1 year ago

Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.

Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?

Geothermal

This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.

Wind

Storage solves this today

In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).

H8crilA3• 1 year ago

I am a nuclear fanboy not because it promises technological breakthroughs (like you wrote, there probably won't be many or even any), but because there just isn't any other option that can deliver continuous power without messing up the climate. I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all. I am an even bigger fan of solar power, but are we really going to have enough battery capacity to reliably run entire countries?

epistasis10• 1 year ago

I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all.

Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-launches...

AngryData4• 1 year ago

Yeah I agree with you. Im not expecting any real improvements in my personal life by going to nuclear power, but it is all but a solved method to produce nearly any amount of power we would want over extremely long timespans with no significant emissions. You want to desalinate massive amounts of water? Nuke plant. You want to run a huge carbon scrubber farm? Nuke plant. You want endless amounts of steel and aluminum processing and fertilizer production that all require large amounts of energy? Nuclear power. And it doesn't need to rely on promises of future technology improvements or mega-structure scale projects like "Cover X entire state with solar panels and install multiple times the worlds current total battery capacity into the grid." Or waiting for the economics of solar panels to make it viable for all consumers and dealing with all the political shenanigans of connecting them to the grid.

ViewTrick10023• 1 year ago

”Baseload” solar is here.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

joe_the_user2• 1 year ago

I think the enthusiasm comes from:

* A contrarianism visa vis environmental crusades against nuclear power that presented it's dangers in a distorted fashion.

* How nuclear on paper presents the possibility of limitless energy with little pollution.

* Nuclear is the kind of big-tech solution that appeals to a lot of nerds.

The problem is that nuclear failed independently from environmental crusades even if some of these were successful. Nuclear power requires vast investment and radiation has the problem that it can weaken anything. Meltdowns aren't the apocalypse environmentalists imply but they destroy permanently a huge store of investment and their commonness has tanked nuclear power independently from popular crusades but those with a stake in nuclear like point to "them hippies" to cover their own failures.

crote4• 1 year ago

Nuclear power requires vast investment

In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.

On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.

Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.

AngryData4• 1 year ago

While there aren't any flashy breakthrough nuclear technologies, we should remember that universities have been doing research and advancing nuclear technology over the decades even when nuclear power plants weren't being built. The US military has wanted to maintain nuclear sciences and students, nuclear medicine has done a lot, material science has come a long ways for nuclear compatible materials, physics and nearly every branch of it has dipped its toes into if not dove right into learning about nuclear forces and nuclear chemistry. Fusion power requires understanding nuclear forces. And of course there are still people looking for the flashy nuclear power breakthrough.

The reactors we see still operating today are mostly designed in like the 70s and 80s, some going back to the 60s, but that is only like 40 years after the invention of nuclear reactors and nuclear power, we are now over 40 years past that again, and our understanding of nuclear sciences is leaps and bounds above what we used to build most nuke plants in existance.

epistasis10• 1 year ago

As far as reactors that could be deployed in the next 10 years, very optimistically we have:

- Westinghouse AP1000

- EDF EPR

- GE-Hitachi BWRX

The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.

If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.

eagerpace• 1 year ago

It’s ok to store this stuff until the triggered tech is available. Even if it’s done in orbit around the moon. This was impossible to think about 10 years ago but it’s possible in the next 10

greenavocado2• 1 year ago

This is a solved problem in a fuel cycle combining Thorium-232 (Th-232) breeding and Plutonium (Pu) incineration, most effectively realized in designs like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs).

Plutonium waste (predominantly Pu-239, but also Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242) is used as the initial fissile driver to start and maintain the chain reaction. Often used as PuF4 dissolved in the fluoride salt. Th-232 (as ThF4) is located in a separate "blanket" region surrounding the core or dissolved in salt channels flowing around the moderator structure. The bred U-233 is chemically separated (online reprocessing is key!) from thorium and fission products in the salt processing system and fed back into the core. While U-233 takes over primary power generation, the Pu isotopes are continuously being consumed

Synaesthesia5• 1 year ago

I see China is building the first commercial Thorium reactors now.

It's fascinating that the entire history of nuclear power is tied up with the history of nuclear weapons.

Throrium was not employed as a reactor fuel because it couldn't be used to make nuclear weapons.

mathgradthrow• 1 year ago

how the hell do you beam neutrons?

maxerickson• 1 year ago

Fusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator

Synaesthesia5• 1 year ago

How about Throrium reactors? Do they solve any problems of waste disposal?

mikewarot• 1 year ago

There's a partially complete facility to do so southwest of Chicago, in Dresden, Illinois[1]. I remember learning about it back in the 1990s. It even has a large cache of spent fuel from a few reactors across the country in storage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Operation

FilosofumRex2• 1 year ago

Interestingly, Trump just bombed Iran's nukes program, but his EO demands at least 20 civil nuclear deals, internationally. Who might be these 20 countries?

chickenbig5• 1 year ago

Hmmm, not a particularly enlightening article. Lots of assertions without numbers. How much does reprocessing cost France? How much does MOX fuel cost France to make?

As for the "five percent of nuclear waste, which is composed of long-lived radioactive material" it rather conflates transuranics (with fairly long half lives) and fission products (which are generally fairly short-lived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product#Lon...). A key benefit of reprocessing is splitting short and long half life materials, which will enable better disposal options tailored to the nature of the material. For instance, short-lived can be vitrified and stored near the surface for a few hundred years, the long-lived baked into synroc. All this has been done.

Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S.

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