Efforts to stand up nuclear fuel recycling projects accelerated this month with two major announcements — easing concern that the United States is moving too slowly to develop a supply chain for advanced reactors.
Curio, based in Washington, D.C., said that national laboratory teams at Idaho, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Sandia completed “critical laboratory-scale demonstrations” of its NuCycle recycling process under the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E energy technology program.
Limited domestic fuel production is a significant obstacle for the nuclear power industry. And bans on both Russian uranium imports and China’s fuel production are leading to more investment in domestic fuel recycling and companies aiming to expand U.S. enrichment capacity.
“I have never seen a better opportunity in my lifetime for the U.S. nuclear sector to turn itself around,” Ed McGinnis, Curio CEO and former acting assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, said in an interview. “But we can’t act like … the single biggest reasons for us not getting order books — lack of a waste solution and a very anemic, fragile and inadequate fuel supply market — don’t exist.”
If it can be scaled up, Curio’s 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.
Ashutosh Goel, a materials science professor at Rutgers University, noted that Curio describes its process as “enrichment-ready” and that, if true, it “should be good for the current or the next generation of reactors.”
“Basically, it’s a very high purity,” he added, adding that experiments ranging from milligrams to 100 grams of gaseous uranium are “a big leap” that supports efforts to scale up the recycling process to meet industry needs.
Curio’s 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 — a $1.6 billion investment projected to create more than 800 jobs.
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.
HALEU is the feedstock for the fuel required by many advanced reactor designs. HALEU is only produced at commercial scale in Russia and China.
But history counsels humility in the nuclear reprocessing field. The U.S. mixed oxide program — meant to turn 34 tons of weapons plutonium into commercial fuel — was halted after ballooning costs and delays. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission later terminated its construction authorization in 2019.
Still, would-be reprocessors believe commercial viability is at hand, at least when using the right technology.
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.
“Utilities 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,” said Nima Ashkeboussi, vice president of government relations at Global Laser Enrichment.
Industry analysts caution that the technical promise must be matched by policy and market design.
“The prospect is either enormous or zero,” Stein of the Breakthrough Institute said. “It hinges mostly on federal policy related to what to do with that nuclear fuel.”
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’s 54 nuclear plants.
Still, Stein said support from the national labs and ARPA-E are meaningful signals to investors when companies move from lab to pilot.
Curio’s Grand Plan
Curio co-founder Rabbi Yechezkel Moskowitz traces the company to his lifelong fascination with nuclear energy — nurtured by his engineer grandfather — and a venture‐building stint that taught him to prize vertical integration and “multi-commodity extraction.”
“My grandfather used to always tell me, ‘Whoever solves the nuclear waste problem will make nuclear energy the energy of the future,’” Moskowitz said in an interview.
In 2018, seeing nuclear waste as the industry’s “albatross,” 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.
“We will initially be a fuel recycler and producer,” Moskowitz said, adding that their recycling process would extract more than just gaseous uranium.
McGinnis said that’s a prime example of how the company has “done a great deal of due diligence on past efforts.” 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.
Moskowitz sees the opportunity to turn waste into profit as a gold mine to propel the company’s larger ambitions and usher in a nuclear golden age.
In the longer term, he said, the supply and demand for fuel supplies could completely change — and that could “completely break the economics of nuclear.”
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.
