A public-private joint venture to use spent nuclear fuel to power micro reactors received a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy, the agency announced recently.
The venture consists of Oklo Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., Deep Isolation of Berkeley, Calif., and the national laboratories at Argonne and Idaho Falls.
Oklo has a microreactor design that needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Deep Isolation, which is working on borehole-style disposal, will tackle wastes from the recycling of spent nuclear fuel. The Idaho National Laboratory will supply the spent nuclear fuel. Oklo and Argonne will concentrate on the fuel recycling.
The project is estimated to cost $5 million and take three years, Bonita Chan, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an email. The $1 million not covered by the $4 million grant announced last week will come from another federal cost-share grant to Oklo, Chan said. Work will take place at the Argonne National Laboratory. Oklo is the project’s lead and will work with the NRC. Argonne will develop additional technology for the project.
NRC staff in January nixed Oklo’s application to license the Aurora microreactor design, but the company can regroup and resubmit the application because the commission denied it without prejudice.
Meanwhile, in the recent round of Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) grants, Deep Isolation also netted a separate $3.6 million grant.
Founded in 2013, Oklo has been working on a microreactor design that could run on spent fuel from other reactors. A microreactor can range in size from 1.5 megawatts to 10 megawatts, which might make it suitable for remote rural areas, among other places.
Deep Isolation’s role will be to analyze the wastes left after recycling the spent fuel. And it will focus on disposing of those wastes, with a likely avenue being its borehole technology.
“After the important work by Argonne and Oklo, a performance model for the ultimate disposal of the final waste form will be developed. … Every fuel cycle will have waste and these wastes need to be managed. Determining the form and contents of this waste is. something that will be dependent on the first stages of this project,” Deep isolation CEO Liz Muller wrote in an email.
Deep Isolation is working on a concept to take fuel assemblies from reactors and put them in 14-foot-long canisters that are 9 to 13 inches in diameter. These would be inserted in vertical boreholes — 14 to 18 inches in diameter — drilled anywhere from a couple thousand feet deep to a couple miles deep. Such a borehole would gradually curve to become a narrow horizontal tunnel that could possibly extend for 2 miles. After a horizontal section is filled with canisters, the vertical boreholes would be filled and sealed with rock, bentonite, and other materials.
Deep Isolation is seeking contracts in the United States, Mexico, South America, Europe, Africa, the Far East and the Middle East. So far, it has not signed any disposal contracts beyond the research on the Oklo project.
