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Argonne ties its nuclear fuel recycling plan to whichever reactor the US builds
After nearly half a century of research, Argonne says pyroprocessing could cut radioactive waste storage from hundreds of thousands of years to hundreds. Its nuclear chemist puts the reactor choice first and the fuel cycle second.
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What happened
- The US target is to add 300GW of nuclear capacity by 2050 and to develop a fuel recycling strategy alongside it that would cut radioactive waste storage from thousands of years to hundreds.
- That expansion would also produce substantially more used nuclear fuel if existing practices stay as they are.
- Argonne National Laboratory says pyroprocessing could cut waste storage from hundreds of thousands of years to hundreds while reducing demand for newly mined uranium.
- The lab has researched used fuel recycling for nearly 50 years, and pyroprocessing is getting renewed attention as a way to make used fuel reusable in advanced reactors.
- Japan weighed the Integral Fast Reactor against MOX fuel in the 1980s and 1990s, chose MOX, and is now evaluating IFR and pyroprocessing again for reactors due in service in the 2040s.
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Why it matters
- constraint Tkac places the recycling approach downstream of the reactor technology selected, so a fuel cycle cannot be procured ahead of the reactor decision it serves.
- exposure Utilities signing for new capacity this decade take on a back-end question the lab has worked on for nearly half a century without closing it.
- precedent Japan's return to a technology it passed over in the 1990s sets the expectation that a pyroprocessing decision is measured against reactors two decades out.
- decision Anyone using the hundreds-of-years storage figure in a siting or permitting argument is leaning on Argonne's projection for fuel that has been through a process. That changes what a hearing has to be shown.
Ninety-four light-water reactors give the US about 100GW of capacity and roughly 20 percent of its electricity [2]. Average that across the fleet and a unit is a little over 1GW [21]. So 300GW of additions is on the order of 280 more reactors the size of the ones already running, or a smaller number of bigger ones [22].
Pyroprocessing uses high temperatures to change solid materials physically or chemically [7]. It was central to Argonne's Integral Fast Reactor program, which put a fast reactor and its fuel recycling on the same site [8]. The Deep Isolation work turns stable oxides from used fuel into metallic form, which has to happen before electrochemical processing [11]. The Oklo work is machine-learning systems and digital twins for electrorefining [13]. In Wisconsin, SHINE Technologies is working with the lab on centrifugal contactors that separate different liquids [14]. Argonne is also building sensors to follow the process in real time and testing cheaper materials that perform the same [12].
Peter Tkac, the Argonne nuclear chemist leading that team, set a limit on how clean the separation should get. "It's very important that we optimize separation steps and develop a process that keeps sensitive nuclear materials mixed together rather than producing pure, separated streams," he said [15]. To see how the chemicals survive a working plant, the team recreates facility radiation with a Van de Graaff electron accelerator and measures how they break down over time [16]. Custom parts come off specialized 3D printers, so designs get screened before anything is built at industrial scale [17].
The lab has started building the technologies, and it has been researching used fuel recycling for nearly half a century [4][6]. Tkac said the team can test separation processes under conditions that mimic high-radiation recycling facilities [20]. The report puts no date or cost on an industrial-scale plant, and says nothing about data centres [24]. On this record I would not put a recycling line in a 2030s capacity plan; the tradeoff is that a utility specifying a reactor now is also settling, by default, which back end is available to it later [19].
A long-range power plan turns on which reactor design is under contract and when it delivers power, and on whether that design burns recycled material at all, or fresh uranium [5]. The customer for pyroprocessing is whoever specifies the reactor, and Argonne's reduction in storage time applies to fuel that has been through the process [5]. "We have a good strategy for recycling nuclear fuel," Tkac said in a press statement [18]. "The approaches taken will depend on nuclear reactor technologies selected for energy production" [19].
What to watch
- Whether Argonne publishes a schedule or a cost per tonne for an industrial-scale pyroprocessing plant.
- Whether Japan's current evaluation picks IFR-style pyroprocessing for its 2040s reactors, having chosen MOX in the 1990s.
- Whether Oklo's reactor design commits to fuel made from recycled material. That commitment would put the electrorefining work on its critical path.