WASHINGTON, D.C. — Materials that used to be considered purely radioactive waste are increasingly being recycled into usable products for everything from medical treatments to advanced nuclear reactors, federal officials said last week.
That was the word July 15 from the Department of Energy’s Under-Secretary for Science Dario Gil along with DOE Environmental Management (EM) field office managers from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina as well as the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
The House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., featured presentations from Gil as well as Savannah River field office manager Edwin Deshong III and Oak Ridge field office manager Eric Olds.
Savannah River is starting to use its H-Canyon facility to extract highly-enriched uranium and blend it down for future use as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) in advanced reactors, Deshong said.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, meanwhile, holds the nation’s inventory of uranium-233, Olds told the gathering of DOE people, contractors, consultants and some legislators. “We are partnered with TerraPower to extract rare medical isotopes from that material for use in advanced cancer treatment research,” Olds said. The first medical treatments from isotopes from the material could reach the market in 2027, he added.
Olds is currently wearing multiple hats for the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, in that in addition to Oak Ridge he is also acting head of the DOE Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office.
The Cleanup Caucus is chaired by Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.).