Studies show that the costs of recycling are higher than direct disposal. Recycling only makes economic sense if the “credits” add up, the credits being the combined value of the reclaimed fissile and fertile material for reuse in reactors and any savings in disposal costs created by reducing the volume, heat load, and half-lives of the remaining waste.
For light water reactor fuel, the numbers still don’t look good, but the advent of HALEU fuel forms could tip the scales, as demonstrated most recently by Oklo’s announcement to build a nuclear fuel recycling facility in Tennessee.
Some in the industry still advocate for a large government program to recycle the current U.S. inventory of spent LWR fuel. However, we would need to pass comprehensive legislation in a debt-ridden and gridlocked Washington that taps the Nuclear Waste Fund to build multi-billion-dollar, DOE-owned, contractor-operated facilities, based on a wild guesstimate about uranium prices 20 years from now.
An “innovation-based approach” to recycling holds much more promise: Rather than engineering the whole cradle-to-grave system at once, take it a step at a time. Fund accelerated R&D for commercial recycling techniques tailored to the likeliest fuel forms. Get the safeguards right using modern tech. Update 40 CFR Part 191, which sets the safety criteria for geologic repositories to include different waste forms and packages and technologies like deep boreholes. While we’re at it, we might as well acknowledge the need for a second repository, given the ongoing stalemate over Yucca.
Here’s an idea: Position the second repository specifically for recycling byproducts with shorter half-lives.
The ultimate goal is to establish some “reality-based pricing” for a range of waste disposal options. Only then can private companies assess the complex technological and economic calculus of building commercial-scale recycling facilities and ultimately move forward. If that takes a decade or two, so be it.
Nearly everyone I know in the nuclear community thinks we will be recycling sometime in the next century, yet no one knows which of the advanced reactor designs (and their fuel forms) will gain commercial traction. So much of this nuclear resurgence has yet to play out.
But in the meantime, let’s not let worries over a couple of volumetric Super Walmarts’ worth of used nuclear fuel force us into bad decisions. Let’s paddle up the Missouri first before we start arguing over our route through the Bitterroots.
We still have a long way to go.
