(Where conventional reactors use uranium enriched up to 5%, HALEU is uranium enriched up to 20%.) The other option to power fast reactors is to create HALEU fuel, which stands for high-assay low-enriched uranium, from scratch, rather than by recycling nuclear waste. TerraPower says it's investing in supply chains and working with elected leaders to build political support, while Oklo has received three government awards and is working with the government to commercialize fast reactor fuel supply chains domestically. Private companies commercializing fast reactor technology are pushing for domestic fuel supply chains to be developed. France, too, has the capacity to recycle used nuclear waste, Gehin said, but the country generally takes its recycled fuel and puts it back into existing light water reactors.įor now, the Idaho National Lab can reprocess enough fuel for research and development, Gehin told CNBC, but not much more. Right now, only Russia has the capacity to do this at scale. While the government is moving slowly, start-ups Oklo and TerraPower and energy giant Westinghouse are working on fast reactor technologies.Įven as private companies are working to innovate and commercialize fast reactor designs, there are significant infrastructure hurdles.īefore nuclear waste can be used to power fast reactors, it has to go through reprocessing. is "effectively yielding leadership to Russia, China, and India who have this critical capability," the Office of Nuclear Energy said in a written statement May. By not having a pilot test facility in the U.S. Department of Energy announced it was building its own fast-spectrum test reactor, the Versatile Test Reactor, but it was not funded in the fiscal year 2022 omnibus funding bill. India and China have plans to build out commercial fast reactors in the future. At the same time, innovators are looking at redesigning fast reactor technology to make it more cost-effective, Gehin said.Ĭurrently, Russia is the only country producing electricity with fast reactor technology. With energy prices spiking thanks to Russia's war in Ukraine, and with the growing public cry to move toward sources of energy that don't emit planet-warming greenhouse gases, nuclear power is getting another look. also suffered from cost overruns," Gehin said.įast forward to 2022. "The development of the first commercial fast reactors in the U.S. Fast reactors were generally thought to be more expensive than traditional light-water reactors, said Gehin, making it an unattractive area for investment. Coal, and later natural gas, remained abundant and cheap. Then, nuclear energy as a whole started falling out of favor, largely because of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, Gehin said. "Fast neutron reactors can more effectively convert uranium-238, which is predominantly what's in spent fuel, to plutonium, so you can fission it," Gehin said. "You can get a large fraction of that energy if you were to recycle the fuel through fast reactors."įast reactors don't slow down the neutrons that are released in the fission reaction, and faster neutrons beget more efficient fission reactions, Gehin told CNBC. "Fundamentally, in light-water reactors, out of the uranium we dig out of the ground, we use a half a percent of the energy that's in the uranium that's dug out of the ground," Gehin told CNBC in a phone interview. There are about 80,000 metric tonnes of used fuel from light-water nuclear reactors in the United States and the existing nuclear fleet produces approximately an additional 2,000 tons of used fuel each year, Gehin told CNBC.īut after a light-water reactor has run its reactor powered by uranium-235, there is still tremendous amount of energy potential still available in what is left. The nuclear fission reaction leaves waste, which is radioactive and has to be maintained carefully.
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