The Department of Energy remains in the early stages of studying potential options for recycling used nuclear power plant fuel, Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Rita Baranwal said Wednesday.
“To look at the option of recycling and what falls under that umbrella, is something that my team has started to do,” Baranwal said during a plenary session for the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management’s online-only annual meeting. “So I don’t have particular options to talk about today. I will say that we’re entertaining a variety of options and a lot of things are on the table.”
In previous public events, Baranwal has mentioned the possibility of using an existing facility in another nation to reprocess U.S. spent fuel. She did not discuss that option Wednesday.
Economics, nonproliferation concerns, and technical issues will all be considered as the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy considers the matter, according to Baranwal.
There is no timeline for a potential recycling demonstration project, she said during the question-and-answer segment of her discussion.
Baranwal, a materials engineer with a background in nuclear fuels, has noted regularly since taking office in July 2019 that used reactor fuel retains 95% of its potential energy. The United States today holds in excess of 80,000 metric tons of the radioactive material, almost all of it kept on-site at the power facilities where it was generated.
The Energy Department is more than 22 years past the Jan. 31, 1998, deadline set by Congress to begin disposal of spent fuel. However, it still does not have anywhere to put it, and the Trump administration this year quit trying to revive DOE’s moribund license application for a geologic repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Meanwhile, it has been nearly 50 years since the United States had an operational commercial reprocessing plant.
If U.S. companies want to compete in the global market for advanced nuclear reactors, they must be able to offer takeback of the used fuel, Baranwal said. That means being able to do something with it, she added
