Curio recently announced the completion of a laboratory-scale demonstration for its nuclear fuel recycling technology, NuCycle, in collaboration with four Department of Energy National Laboratories.
DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico contributed to the Washington, D.C.-based advanced nuclear company’s demonstration, Curio said in a Sept. 4 press release.
According to Curio, NuCycle is the first nuclear fuel recycling technology designed from the ground up with safeguards and proliferation-hardening integrated into its process to be tested and validated at the lab-level.
In collaboration with ORNL, Curio demonstrated its voloxidation techniques, which offer efficiency and scalability in decladding nuclear waste, the company said. Curio said during the lab-scale tests more than 99.75% of the fuel was released from its zircaloy cladding.
Within DOE’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) voucher program, ORNL completed criticality safety assessments of Curio’s equipment designs with no safety problems identified, the company said.
The pulverized product from ORNL was then shipped to PNNL, where Curio’s fluorination circuit was validated, according to Curio. The company said the decontamination process produced enrichment-ready uranium hexafluoride at “some of the purest levels ever recorded from a single-stage process”, according to the press release.
Working with PNNL, Curio scaled the chemical process from milligram-level experiments to 100 grams, a 10,000-fold increase in capacity, according to the press release.
At INL, Curio received data to enable its electrolysis process for recycling nuclear fuel, which took place in a molten-salt bath to separate actinides present in the spent nuclear fuel.
“By systematically varying temperature and concentration, the teams were able to study the fundamental redox chemistry that will enable co-extraction of plutonium with uranium and minor actinides in a proliferation-hardened manner,” according to the press release.
Curio said the data from the previous lab experiments will inform its work with Sandia to develop a detailed safeguards and security model. The collaboration will conduct iterative material control and accounting analysis, using the experimental results to create a nuclear fuel recycling process that is safeguarded by design, according to Curio.
The company intends to complete lab-scale demonstration with actual nuclear waste at INL and is currently exploring a first pilot with DOE, according to the press release.