The Department of Energy wants to hear by June 16 from entities doing research and development on technology to transmute nuclear waste into other things, the agency wrote Monday in a request for information.
DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) seeks “novel and disruptive technologies that are early in the R&D cycle” and could “reduce the volume, radiotoxicity, and storage time of spent nuclear fuel,” according to the request for information, titled “Transmutation of Nuclear Waste” and posted online Monday.
In its request for information, ARPA-E allowed that reprocessing of waste might be necessary for transmutation and that “[f]unds for the decommissioning of reactors as well as the nuclear waste fund may be available for these types of activities.”
The Nuclear Waste Fund, set aside for development of a permanent geologic repository, has a balance of about $45 billion and earns about $1.5 billion in interest annually, APRA-E wrote in the request for information.
APRA-E also ruled a few things out of its request for information. The agency does not want to hear about:
- Transmutation initiated by fusion processes
- Fission-fusion hybrid devices
- Separations of minor actinides from used nuclear fuel
- The use of transmutation to produce medical radioisotopes
Commercial power plants across the country had generated about 86.5 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel as of December 2020, according to a November 2021 report from the Savannah River National Laboratory.
DOE was managing about 2.2 metric tons of its own spent fuel as of December 2020, according to the Savannah River lab’s report.
Commercial spent fuel reprocessing remains essentially dead in the U.S., as it has for decades. In 2021, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission discontinued a reprocessing rulemaking, essentially for lack of interest.
