After-Pop! Wait... Should We Recycle Used Nuclear Fuel? The History, Economics, and Proliferation concerns

Speaker 0 (0:00): This AfterPop is sponsored by the Nuclear Talent Scout. Welcome to the AfterPop, where we break down a little bit more about our previous conversations. Today, we're gonna be talking about our conversation with Ed McGinnis, the new cycle process, and the history of recycling spent nuclear fuel. He said something in that interview that stood out. We've got 90,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel sitting at reactor sites across the country, and that 96% of the energy in that fuel hasn't been touched.

Speaker 0 (0:40): The physics checks out. But here's the thing. How we've recycled nuclear fuel in the past is worth noting. So today, we're gonna be talking about what it takes to recycle nuclear fuel profitably and at scale. The countries that have tried or are actively trying have spent staggering amounts of money, and the results are complicated.

Speaker 0 (1:06): So let's talk about what happened when countries used the Pyrrhic process to recycle nuclear fuel. Not the theory, but the track record. Let's start with France. France is the gold standard for nuclear fuel recycling. Their Lahague plant on the Normandy Coast has been running since 1976.

Speaker 0 (1:27): It can handle about 1,700 metric tons of spent fuel per year. Right now, it processes around 1,000 to 1,100 tons annually. Orano, that's the company that used to be called Arriva, spends over €850,000,000 a year running that site. And what does France get for all of that money? They make MOX fuel.

Speaker 0 (1:52): That stands for mixed oxide, which blends the recovered plutonium with uranium so it can go back into a reactor. MALC saves France about a fifth of the fresh uranium they'd otherwise need to mine. Since they've started, they've saved roughly 18,000 metric tons of natural uranium. That's real, and it matters. But here's the catch.

Speaker 0 (2:16): France's own court of auditors estimated that the total cost of reprocessing over the program's lifetime ranges from 16,000,000,000 to €58,000,000,000, depending on how you count it. And mox fuel is more expensive to fabricate than fresh uranium fuel. At today's uranium prices, around $85 a pound, it's cheaper to just mine new uranium than to recycle the old stuff. How much cheaper? A study from Harvard's Belfer Center found that reprocessing doesn't break even until uranium hits about 360 per kilogram.

Speaker 0 (2:55): That's roughly $140 a pound. We're at 85. So uranium prices would need to nearly double before recycling starts to make pure economic sense. Now look at The UK. Selafil's Thorpe plant, thermal oxide reprocessing plant, was built for 1,800,000,000 British units, that is, and opened in 1994.

Speaker 0 (3:21): It was supposed to generate £500,000,000 in profit. Instead, by 2003, it had racked up over £1,000,000,000 in losses. It fell years behind on throughput targets. A major internal leak shut it down for two and a half years. Then they finally closed it in November 2018.

Speaker 0 (3:44): And the cleanup? The UK's nuclear decommissioning authority estimates Sellafield will cost £136,000,000,000 to decommission and could go as high as £250,000,000,000. That cleanup won't be finished until 2125. That's a hundred years from now. Then there's Japan.

Speaker 0 (4:07): Rokasho. Oh, boy. The Rokasho reprocessing plant was supposed to have opened in 1997. It's now 2026, and it's still not fully operational. Construction costs have ballooned to 3,700,000,000,000 yen, about $25,000,000,000 And the total life cycle cost, including forty years of operation and decommissioning, 15,600,000,000,000 yen.

Speaker 0 (4:35): That's over $100,000,000,000 for a plant that hasn't processed a single ton of commercial fuel at full capacity. So when Ed talks about the $13,000,000,000 in sunk US investments that got stranded after Carter's ban, that's real money. But compared to what other countries spent actually building and running these programs, 13,000,000,000 might been the cheap way out. Now let's talk about what Purex actually does because that episode draws a line between PUREX and Curio's new cycle process. PUREX stands for plutonium uranium reduction extraction.

Speaker 0 (5:18): It's a chemical process that dissolves spent fuel in nitric acid and uses an organic solvent to separate out the uranium and plutonium. It's incredibly good at what it does. Recovery rates for both uranium and plutonium exceed ninety nine point five percent. Some facilities hit ninety nine point nine. So that 96% still usable claim Ed made, the chemistry backs it up.

Speaker 0 (5:45): Purics can recover almost all of the uranium and plutonium from spent fuel. What's left? The fission products? The minor actinides? That's roughly three to 4% of what's genuinely used up.

Speaker 0 (5:59): That residual waste gets vitrified, I. E, turned into glass logs. And it is much less volume than the original spent fuel assemblies. But and this is the most important. Purex was designed during the Manhattan Project era to produce separated weapons grade plutonium.

Speaker 0 (6:21): That's what it's for. The civilian application came later, and the civilian version does the same thing. It produces a stream of pure plutonium oxide. France's Lahog facility separates about 11 metric tons of plutonium every year. They fabricate most of it into MOX fuel, but the stockpile grows faster than they can burn it.

Speaker 0 (6:44): France currently holds about 99 metric tons of separated civilian plutonium. Japan, 44.4 metric tons. Most of it sitting in France and The UK because Japan can't process it yet. And MOX doesn't close the fuel cycle. It extends it.

Speaker 0 (7:04): You get one more pass through a reactor, maybe two. And after that, the spent MOX fuel is even harder to reprocess than the original spent uranium fuel. France currently stores its spent MOX with no plans to recycle it further, which brings us to the proliferation question. And that's why we wanted to bring this up. Ed addresses this within Curio.

Speaker 0 (7:30): He said Curio's process never separates pure plutonium, and that's a genuinely important distinction. But let's try and understand why Jimmy Carter was worried in the first place. In 1974, India detonated a nuclear device called Smiling Buddha. The plutonium for that bomb came from the Cirrus reactor, a research reactor supplied by Canada with heavy water from The United States under agreements specifically for peaceful use. India used a pyrites type process to separate the plutonium.

Speaker 0 (8:05): They called it a peaceful nuclear explosion. Nobody bought it. That test is why Carter issued his executive order on 04/07/1977, indefinitely deferring commercial reprocessing in The United States. His concern was straightforward. If the world builds an economy around separated plutonium, shipping it between countries, stockpiling it at facilities, fabricating it into fuel, the opportunities for diversion multiply, not just by nations, by anyone.

Speaker 0 (8:40): Reagan lifted Carter's ban, but the momentum was gone. The infrastructure had been dismantled. The companies had moved on. And, honestly, the proliferation concern didn't go away just because the policy changed. So if we look at it from what does 44 metric tons of separated plutonium mean?

Speaker 0 (9:01): It means more distrust. China's military pointed out that Japan has enough plutonium for roughly 500 nuclear warheads. Even though Japan has no intention of building weapons, the material exists, it's there, and it sows seeds of distrust. That's the fundamental tension with any reprocessing program that produces separated plutonium. So what would Curio or any other next generation recycling actually have to solve?

Speaker 0 (9:33): First, cost. Recycling has to compete with mining, and right now, it doesn't. Uranium would need to hit roughly $140 a pound to break even with reprocessing costs. Prices are trending up. We hit $100 briefly in early twenty twenty six, but we're not there yet.

Speaker 0 (9:54): Curio's 4,000 metric tons per year vision is ambitious. But scale doesn't automatically mean cheaper, building one off projects that never achieve the cost saving of serial production. Second, proliferation resistance. This is where alternative technologies come in. UREX modifies the purex chemistry so plutonium is never separated on its own.

Speaker 0 (10:19): It stays mixed with other elements. Coex keeps uranium and plutonium together throughout this process. Pyroprocessing uses molten salt instead of liquid solvents and produces a mixed metal product, not pure plutonium. Curio says new cycle falls into this category, validated by four DOE national labs in September 2025. That's promising, but proliferation resistant is not the same as proliferation proof, and the international community will need to see that demonstrated at scale.

Speaker 0 (10:55): Third, regulation. Curio just submitted a letter of intent to the NRC in May 2026 to begin pre application engagement for a Part 70 operating license. There is no precedent for licensing a commercial recycling facility in The United States. None. The NRC will essentially be writing the rulebook as they go.

Speaker 0 (11:17): And that takes time. Curio is targeting pilot scale demonstrations by late twenty twenty seven, but the full licensing pathway, that's uncharted territory. Fourth, waste. Recycling doesn't eliminate nuclear waste. It transforms it.

Speaker 0 (11:35): Ed's right that the remaining fission products are dangerous for about three hundred years instead of a hundred thousand years. That's a massive difference. But you still have high level waste that needs permanent disposal, and you have secondary waste streams from the chemical process. That waste problem gets smaller but doesn't disappear. And fifth, public trust.

Speaker 0 (11:59): Nuclear waste is one of the most politically toxic phrases in American English. Nobody likes it. Recycling is one of the most positive. Whether rebranding the conversation actually changes the politics, we'll see. So Ed's not wrong about the physics.

Speaker 0 (12:17): The energy is sitting there, and the idea that we could recover it instead of burying it for a hundred thousand years is genuinely compelling. But the history tells us something too. France, The UK, Japan, these are serious countries with serious nuclear programs. And they all found that recycling with Purex is harder, more expensive, and more complicated than the pitch suggests. That doesn't mean it's impossible.

Speaker 0 (12:45): It means the next generation of technology, Curios or whoever's next, has to be meaningfully better than what came before, not just technically, but economically, regulatorily, and politically. What would have to be true for this to work? Uranium prices would need to keep climbing. Or if The United States was prioritizing its own uranium supply, The NRC would need to create a viable licensing pathway. The proliferation resistance claims would need to hold up under international scrutiny.

Speaker 0 (13:19): And the cost per ton of recycled fuel would need to come down far enough that utilities actually want to buy it. Can all of that happen? I'd love to see it. And I'm genuinely curious to watch it play out. Because whether we like it or not, we are in a new nuclear age.

Speaker 0 (13:37): Whether we're building new reactors or recycling old fuel, the workforce question is still the same. We need people who understand this stuff. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to follow and subscribe to Naked Nuclear. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I'll see you in the next one.

Unknown Speaker (13:56): Until next time. Stay curious.