DOE Grant Fuels Race to Recycle America's Nuclear Waste

WASHINGTON, DC – February 06, 2026 – The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a significant grant to Curio®, a nuclear technology firm, to accelerate the development of a novel process aimed at solving one of the most persistent challenges of the atomic age: what to do with used nuclear fuel. The funding propels Curio’s NuCycle® technology from the laboratory toward a pilot-scale demonstration, representing a critical step in a national strategy to transform nuclear waste from a costly liability into a valuable domestic energy resource.

The grant supports a collaboration between Curio and a consortium of national laboratories, including Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Their mission is to refine the engineering designs necessary to scale up NuCycle®, a technology that promises to dramatically reduce the volume of high-level radioactive waste while recovering valuable materials for reuse.

“This award is further validation of Curio’s game-changing advanced nuclear recycling technology and process for the future of nuclear energy in the United States,” said Ed McGinnis, CEO of Curio, in a statement. “NuCycle will fundamentally change how used nuclear fuel is processed and managed.”

A New Recipe for Nuclear Waste

For decades, the U.S. has pursued a policy of direct disposal for its spent nuclear fuel, leaving over 90,000 metric tons of material stored at reactor sites across the country. Curio’s NuCycle® represents a significant departure from this approach, leveraging a dry, modular process that differs fundamentally from historical reprocessing methods like PUREX, which were criticized for proliferation risks due to the separation of pure plutonium.

NuCycle® employs a multi-step chemical process. It begins with voloxidation, an innovative technique developed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory that efficiently frees the uranium fuel from its metal cladding. This is followed by selective fluorination, where fluorine gas is used to convert the recovered uranium into uranium hexafluoride (UF6). This UF6 is purified to a level where it can be directly reintroduced into the front end of the fuel cycle for enrichment and fabrication into new fuel rods.

Crucially, the technology is built on a principle of “safeguards-by-design.” Instead of separating plutonium, it co-extracts all transuranic elements—the long-lived, highly radioactive components of spent fuel—into a single stream. This mixed material, which Curio calls TRUfuel, can be used to power a new generation of advanced fast reactors, but its combined nature makes it inherently difficult to divert for illicit weapons purposes. The company claims the process can recover over 99% of the uranium and reduce the final volume of high-level waste by as much as 96%.

A Strategic Bet on American Energy Independence

The DOE's investment is more than just a vote of confidence in a single technology; it is a key component of a broader federal strategy to reinvigorate the U.S. nuclear industry and secure the nation's energy future. With the administration aiming to significantly expand nuclear power capacity by 2050, developing a domestic solution for the fuel cycle is paramount. Recycling could extend the energy potential of existing used fuel by over 90% and ease long-term pressures on global uranium supplies.

By transforming used fuel into an asset, the government hopes to solve both an environmental and an economic problem. The failure to establish a permanent geological repository like the one proposed at Yucca Mountain has cost U.S. taxpayers billions in legal damages paid to utilities for failing to take possession of their waste. NuCycle® and similar technologies offer a path to not only manage this material but also generate revenue from it.

Beyond producing new fuel, Curio plans to extract and sell over 10 different valuable isotopes from the waste stream for use in medicine, industry, and national security applications. This economic model, if successful, could shift nuclear recycling from a government-subsidized cleanup effort into a commercially viable industry, ushering in what Curio calls “The 2nd Nuclear Era®.”

The Competitive Race to a Closed Fuel Cycle

Curio is a prominent contender, but it is not alone in the race to commercialize advanced nuclear recycling. A growing number of companies, backed by both private investment and federal funding, are pursuing different technological pathways to the same goal.

California-based Oklo Inc. is developing a facility in Tennessee to reprocess spent fuel using electrorefining-based pyroprocessing, a high-temperature electrochemical method designed to produce new metal fuel for its Aurora-series fast reactors. Shine Technologies in Wisconsin is pursuing a license for a facility that would use a modified version of the traditional aqueous PUREX process, called codecontamination, which also avoids the separation of pure plutonium.

Meanwhile, TerraPower, the advanced reactor company co-founded by Bill Gates, is researching a chloride-based volatility process to separate uranium. Each of these approaches has unique advantages and challenges, and their competition is driving innovation across the sector. Curio's key differentiators remain its lab-scale validation across four national labs and its integrated design focused on proliferation resistance from the ground up.

Navigating the Gauntlet of Regulation and Economics

Despite the technological promise and government support, the path to commercial-scale nuclear recycling is fraught with challenges. The most significant hurdle is the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), whose licensing process for novel nuclear facilities has been historically slow and costly. While recent legislation like the ADVANCE Act aims to streamline this process for advanced reactors, companies like Curio will still face intense scrutiny.

Public perception and the unresolved issue of permanent disposal also loom large. While NuCycle® dramatically reduces waste volume, it does not eliminate it. The resulting highly concentrated waste forms must be proven stable and safe for millennia, and the nation still lacks a permanent repository for their ultimate disposal. Demonstrating the safety and security of handling large quantities of transuranic materials will be paramount for gaining both regulatory and public acceptance.

The economic viability of the entire enterprise remains to be proven at scale. The DOE grant de-risks the next phase of development, but building a pilot facility—which Curio targets for 2027—and eventually a full-scale commercial plant will require immense capital investment. The success of Curio and its competitors will depend on their ability to prove that the value of the recovered uranium, advanced reactor fuel, and commercial isotopes can outweigh the substantial costs of construction, operation, and navigating the complex regulatory landscape.