SUN VALLEY, IDAHO — Despite a perceived lack of interest in the technology at the federal level and a major roadblock in the form of federal nuclear-waste law, Curio Solutions is still carrying a torch for spent fuel reprocessing and the company’s CEO wants Congress to know.
“We have a once-through fuel cycle that treats used nuclear fuel as waste,” Ed McGinnis, CEO of nuclear technology company Curio Solutions and former acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said Wednesday during the Nuclear Industry Council’s annual Advanced Reactors Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho. “There’s no legal pathway [for spent fuel recycling] unless and until the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is adjusted to allow for recycling.”
As it stands, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) holds that the only destination for the nation’s spent fuel inventory should be a permanent geologic repository — namely, the defunct Yucca Mountain site in Nye County, Nev., which remains little more than a construction site after political pressure from Nevada politicos caused then-President Barack Obama to pull the project’s funding in 2011.
That option remains “politically unworkable for either political party,” McGinnis said, so Curio has been working with the public to pressure Congress to “reconsider the once-through fuel cycle” and consider recycling as a spent fuel solution.
Curio wants to provide the feds “with an awareness that there is a company out here in the U.S. that believes recycling is the way to go,” McGinnis told RadWaste Monitor after his remarks. “We have a design, and we’re ready to address, once and for all, what is described and seen publicly as the nuclear waste problem, which is anything but a nuclear waste problem.”
Curio is developing a three-stage spent fuel recycling unit that could accept about 400 metric tons of fuel at a time, McGinnis said. A proposed plant of such units could recycle around 4,000 metric tons of fuel, he said. The company plans to demonstrate the technology at lab scale in 2024 or 2025, and aims to demo the full system by 2028 or so.
As for how Congress should update existing nuclear waste law, McGinnis said NWPA should be amended “in a way that allows the private sector to bring its innovative ideas to try and solve these issues.” In particular, he recommended that the law be expanded to allow private recycling companies, not just the Department of Energy, to take title to spent nuclear fuel currently stranded at power reactor sites across the country.
McGinnis told RadWaste Monitor that he was “optimistic that there’s a path forward” on the NWPA issue and that he believed there is “stronger and stronger resonance” with the idea of spent fuel recycling in Congress.
“Let’s try something different,” McGinnis said. “Let’s give the private sector an opportunity to go after these difficult issues and turn it into a win-win.”
It’s a high-spirited pitch, arriving as it does only a year after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ceased working on a rulemaking for spent fuel reprocessing, citing a general lack of interest.
Meanwhile, NWPA’s restrictions aren’t just proving a roadblock to private companies working on new technologies. DOE is also staring down the nuclear waste law while it works on siting a potential federal interim storage facility.
The Joe Biden administration’s nominee to lead DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Kathryn Huff, has acknowledged that NWPA would need an amendment before the feds could actually build such a site. Huff suggested to RadWaste Monitor March 16 that Congress could stand up a “TVA-like authority” to manage a federal interim storage facility.
Updated 04/14/2022 2:45 p.m. Eastern time to reflect that a plant of Curio fuel processing units could recycle approximately 4,000 metric tons of spent fuel.
