The American public might be broadly receptive to recycling spent nuclear fuel, the Department of Energy’s recently confirmed assistant secretary for nuclear energy told a professional gathering Tuesday.
“I really hope that we can kind of bring some attention to the value in recycling spent nuclear fuel,” Kathryn Huff, the new head of DOE’s nuclear energy office, said during a panel discussion at the American Nuclear Society’s annual conference in Anaheim, Calif. “I think the vast majority of the public is very receptive to the notion of recycling,” she said.
Americans should view spent fuel reprocessing in the same way they look at other forms of recycling, Huff said.
“We spend all day recycling plastic bottles and trying to keep the ocean clean” said Huff. “It’s clear that, if you’re leaving 96% of the energy in the fuel and burying it, there’s more to be done.”
Despite Huff’s optimism about the future of reprocessing, the practice has been met with little enthusiasm across industry and government in recent years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March 2021 canned a proposed rulemaking to regulate spent fuel recycling, citing a lack of interest in such an activity.
Even during the Donald Trump administration, when DOE promoted spent fuel reprocessing as a potential solution for the nation’s spent fuel inventory, there wasn’t much movement about the practice in Washington.
Meanwhile, some private companies are working to pull reprocessing out of its decades-long purgatory. Nuclear technology company Curio Solutions is developing a multi-stage reprocessing unit that could recycle around 4,000 metric tons of spent fuel at once.
Edward McGinnis, former acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy and current CEO of Curio, told Exchange Monitor at the Advanced Reactors Summit in April that he believes there is “stronger and stronger resonance” with the idea of spent fuel recycling in Congress.
