New Process Aims to Recover Billions in Value From US Nuclear Waste

The United States has about 94,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste in storage, most of it never reprocessed since the country abandoned nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors in the 1970s. Researchers at SHINE Technologies, Argonne National Laboratory and Case Western Reserve University, working under the US Department of Energy, are developing a new process to recover much of that waste's value instead of simply burying it.

Spent nuclear fuel still contains about 90% of its original uranium and plutonium, along with isotopes such as strontium-90, rhodium-103 and palladium-105-110 that have medical, industrial and space applications. The team estimates these isotopes alone are worth about $24 billion, with the recoverable uranium and plutonium fuel worth far more.

The project, called Recover Elements – Destroy Undesirables – Create Energy (REDUCE), aims to speed up the chemical separation used to sort nuclear waste into its component elements. Conventional separation methods such as PUREX rely on gravity-fed columns that take hours to separate elements and can lose short-half-life isotopes in the process. REDUCE instead uses Packed Centrifugal Equipment for Radiochemical Separation (PaCERS), which spins the dissolved fuel at more than 1,000 times the force of gravity, cutting separation time to seconds and allowing for a smaller plant.

According to the team, material that cannot be recycled for commercial use could then be bombarded with neutrons from future fission reactors, converting it into shorter-lived elements that decay within decades, years or even minutes, instead of requiring burial for more than 100,000 years.

SHINE Technologies already separates radioactive materials to produce medical isotopes today and is applying that expertise to help move the PaCERS technology toward practical use, said Ross Radel, the company's chief technology officer.