Biden Offers Companies Millions To Help U.S. Break Russia’s Monopoly On A Vital Resource

The Biden administration showed up to last month’s global climate summit in Dubai with a radical new plan to replace coal and compete again with Russia and China over a technology American scientists pioneered.

The United States led nearly two dozen other nations in a calling on the U.S. to ban imports of Russian uranium.

The U.S. used to produce most of its own reactor fuel. As part of the 1990s, a Clinton-era deal encouraged the struggling post-Soviet Russia to dismantle its nuclear weapons, however, the U.S. agreed to buy any reactor fuel made from weapons. The cheap supply of Russian fuel put U.S. enrichers out of business, with the last facility closing down a decade ago.

Existing reactors have alternatives to Russia.

Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia ― the top three suppliers of uranium to the U.S., respectively ― are all looking to increase mining. France’s state-owned uranium company, Orano, announced plans in October to increase enriched fuel production by 30%. Three new uranium mines entered into production in Arizona and Utah in just the past few months.

But next-generation reactors that need HALEU suffer from a classic chicken-versus-egg problem. Who can confidently invest in building a first-of-a-kind reactor that needs Russian fuel while the U.S. is trading barbs with Moscow? Who can confidently invest in enriching fuel for reactors that don’t currently exist and are not yet even licensed in the U.S.?

The federal government is providing an answer to both by pumping billions into propping up advanced reactors and fuel production in hopes they can advance simultaneously in time for the projected start of the new nuclear rollout at the start of the 2030s.

But Edward McGinnis, who spent 30 years working on nuclear power at the Energy Department before becoming the chief executive of the fuel-recycling startup Curio, said the Biden administration is overlooking a vital potential source of HALEU: nuclear waste.

The spent rods of uranium pellets that come out of traditional reactors after a two-year fuel cycle still contain as much as 97% of their energy ― which is why the material remains dangerously radioactive for so long. Companies like Curio want to use special tools to separate all the different radioactive isotopes out of nuclear waste, dramatically reducing how much toxic material needs to be stored long term and increasing the domestic supply of reactor fuel.

Recycling nuclear waste is a complicated process that the U.S. government feared in the 1970s would increase the supply of radioactive materials for weapons, banning the nation’s first facility from opening. France, Russia and Japan all built plants to reprocess uranium fuel. While the U.S. lifted its ban on nuclear recycling in 2005, no company has yet made a serious attempt to build a new facility.

The IRA legislation that provided the new funding for HALEU production did not include recycling nuclear waste.

The draft letter of the Energy Department’s latest request for proposals for enriching HALEU states on page 8 that the uranium used to make the fuel “must have been mined and converted, and not come from a source that was recycled or reprocessed.”

“Some people don’t realize when we’re saying we need to support HALEU that recycling can be one of the two solid legs of our future nuclear fuel domestic production capability,” McGinnis said by phone Tuesday.

The main federal effort for funding nuclear waste recycling is the Energy Department’s experimental ARPA-E program, which in 2022 gave out $38 million to companies and laboratories for research, including $5 million to Curio.

Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), who chairs the House’s appropriations subcommittee on water and energy, tacked $15 million for reprocessing uranium fuel onto the latest federal budget proposal to help companies advance beyond the research phase into licensing and locating an actual plant.

McGinnis said the U.S. hasn’t even considered spending that kind of money deploying nuclear waste recycling in at least 15 years. He called on the Senate and White House to champion the measure in budget talks.

“You’re not only complementing the traditional uranium mining, you’re also, by extracting from our so-called nuclear waste, solving to a large degree the nuclear waste problem at the same time,” he said. “It’s a win-win.”