Efforts to stand up nuclear fuel recycling projects accelerated this month with two major announcements \u2014 easing concern that the United States is moving too slowly to develop a supply chain for advanced reactors. <\/p>\n
Curio, based in Washington, D.C., said that national laboratory teams at Idaho, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Sandia completed \u201ccritical laboratory-scale demonstrations\u201d of its NuCycle recycling process under the Department of Energy\u2019s ARPA-E energy technology program.<\/p>\n
Limited domestic fuel production is a significant obstacle for the nuclear power industry. And bans on both Russian uranium imports and China\u2019s fuel production are leading to more investment in domestic fuel recycling and companies aiming to expand U.S. enrichment capacity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have never seen a better opportunity in my lifetime for the U.S. nuclear sector to turn itself around,\u201d Ed McGinnis, Curio CEO and former acting assistant secretary for the DOE\u2019s Office of Nuclear Energy, said in an interview. \u201cBut we can\u2019t act like \u2026 the single biggest reasons for us not getting order books \u2014 lack of a waste solution and a very anemic, fragile and inadequate fuel supply market \u2014 don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
If it can be scaled up, Curio\u2019s recycling process could alleviate a bottleneck in obtaining uranium hexafluoride. Currently, there is only one U.S. plant that converts raw uranium into a gaseous form for enrichment and fuel fabrication.<\/p>\n
![\"Ed](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/ew-0915-camacho-nuclear-2000-02.jpg\" "\\"Ed"){kind=spacer}
Ed McGinnis helmed DOE\u2019s Office of Nuclear Energy during the first Trump administration. Now, he\u2019s helping steer startup Curio to alleviate America\u2019s nuclear waste buildup. | Francisco \u201cA.J.\u201d Camacho\/POLITICO\u2019s E&E News<\/p>\n
Ashutosh Goel, a materials science professor at Rutgers University, noted that Curio describes its process as \u201cenrichment-ready\u201d and that, if true, it \u201cshould be good for the current or the next generation of reactors.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, it\u2019s a very high purity,\u201d he added, adding that experiments ranging from milligrams to 100 grams of gaseous uranium are \u201ca big leap\u201d that supports efforts to scale up the recycling process to meet industry needs.<\/p>\n
Curio\u2019s announcement came that same day that advanced reactor designer Oklo, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said it will build a first-of-its-kind fuel recycling facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, by the early 2030s \u2014 a $1.6 billion investment projected to create more than 800 jobs.<\/p>\n
Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy and innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, said the investment in fuel recycling indicates the process might be a far more economic approach than producing high-assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, from scratch.<\/p>\n
HALEU is the feedstock for the fuel required by many advanced reactor designs. HALEU is only produced at commercial scale in Russia and China.<\/p>\n
But history counsels humility in the nuclear reprocessing field. The U.S. mixed oxide program \u2014 meant to turn 34 tons of weapons plutonium into commercial fuel \u2014 was halted after ballooning costs and delays. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission later terminated its construction authorization in 2019.<\/p>\n
Still, would-be reprocessors believe commercial viability is at hand, at least when using the right technology.<\/p>\n
Global Laser Enrichment, for example, was founded in 2007 and is currently testing its technology in North Carolina. The laser technology has its origins in the 1970s, and the company has an agreement with DOE to enrich gaseous uranium waste.<\/p>\n
\u201cUtilities are in a bit of a squeeze from the market incumbents. They want to see not just new market entrants and competition; they want to see cost-competitive market entrants come into the space,\u201d said Nima Ashkeboussi, vice president of government relations at Global Laser Enrichment.<\/p>\n
Industry analysts caution that the technical promise must be matched by policy and market design.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe prospect is either enormous or zero,\u201d Stein of the Breakthrough Institute said. \u201cIt hinges mostly on federal policy related to what to do with that nuclear fuel.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the potential market for reprocessing could bottom out if the U.S. recommits to developing a long-term nuclear waste repository such as at Yucca Mountain. But if the U.S. embraces reprocessing as a policy, companies like Curio and Oklo may get a boost and secure access to vast amounts of spent fuel sitting in storage at America\u2019s 54 nuclear plants.<\/p>\n
Still, Stein said support from the national labs and ARPA-E are meaningful signals to investors when companies move from lab to pilot.<\/p>\n
Curio\u2019s Grand Plan<\/p>\n
Curio co-founder Rabbi Yechezkel Moskowitz traces the company to his lifelong fascination with nuclear energy \u2014 nurtured by his engineer grandfather \u2014 and a venture\u2010building stint that taught him to prize vertical integration and \u201cmulti-commodity extraction.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy grandfather used to always tell me, \u2018Whoever solves the nuclear waste problem will make nuclear energy the energy of the future,\u2019\u201d Moskowitz said in an interview.<\/p>\n
In 2018, seeing nuclear waste as the industry\u2019s \u201calbatross,\u201d he and his brother launched Curio, hired engineers and set out to design a new, economical recycling technology that avoids new waste and addresses nonproliferation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will initially be a fuel recycler and producer,\u201d Moskowitz said, adding that their recycling process would extract more than just gaseous uranium.<\/p>\n
McGinnis said that\u2019s a prime example of how the company has \u201cdone a great deal of due diligence on past efforts.\u201d He argues that by extracting medical isotopes and certain valuable metals from the waste in addition to the converted uranium, the company will de-risk the impact of a decline in the value of any one isotope.<\/p>\n
Moskowitz sees the opportunity to turn waste into profit as a gold mine to propel the company\u2019s larger ambitions and usher in a nuclear golden age.<\/p>\n
In the longer term, he said, the supply and demand for fuel supplies could completely change \u2014 and that could \u201ccompletely break the economics of nuclear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether that future materializes will depend on licensing clarity, financing, and the ability to move from 100-gram experiments to commercial modules without eroding safety, security or economics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Efforts to stand up nuclear fuel recycling projects accelerated this month with two major announcements \u2014 easing concern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26680,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-26679","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}