The Department of Energy is looking for a cash boost to keep researching whether recycling highly-enriched uranium from test reactors is a possible route to producing advanced nuclear fuel, the agency said in budget justification documents published last week.
In its fiscal year 2022 budget request, the agency seeks $35 million this fiscal year to fund the Material Recovery and Waste Form Development program (MRWFD) subprogram, which lies within the Office of Nuclear Energy’s (ONE) fuel cycle research and development section. That’s about a 40% increase from the $25 million the subprogram got in fiscal 2021.
The subprogram plans to staff up in fiscal year 2022 to continue work producing high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) out of fuel leftover from the long-shuttered Experimental Breeder Reactor-II, according to the budget request.
A pilot facility for testing HALEU recovery processes using highly-enriched uranium has already been constructed at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). In fiscal year 2022 the program will “expand technical capabilities to establish a new back-end polishing process,” the budget justification said.
Also planned for INL: the Microreactor Applications, Research, Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) Project, which cleared a final environmental review from DOE last week. The test microreactor will be powered by HALEU.
The department’s funding request for MRWFD is part of its almost $370 million ask for the nuclear energy office’s fuel cycle R&D program. The budget proposal also includes $62 million for used fuel disposition research.
