More than 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sit in temporary storage at reactor sites and federal reservations across the United States, with no permanent repository in operation and no commercial recycling program in place. In late April 2026, the Department of Energy moved to change that, issuing two formal Requests for Applications that invite private companies to design, build, and operate facilities capable of recycling used reactor fuel. It is the most concrete federal step toward commercial reprocessing since the U.S. effectively abandoned the practice nearly five decades ago.
What DOE announced and why it matters
The twin solicitations, released on April 22, 2026, came jointly from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy and its Office of Environmental Management. The NE solicitation creates an authorization pathway for private firms to propose, site, and eventually run nuclear recycling plants. The companion EM solicitation targets the government’s own stockpile of irradiated fuel held at federal sites, including the Hanford reservation in Washington state and Idaho National Laboratory.
Both RFAs fall under the Advanced Nuclear Fuel Recycling Program, which DOE describes on a dedicated program page and ties directly to Executive Order 14299, “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security,” signed in May 2025. That order directed federal agencies to remove barriers to commercial participation in nuclear fuel-cycle activities that had long been restricted to government-run programs.
NE Assistant Secretary Ted Garrish said the effort is designed to broaden domestic fuel supplies and accelerate deployment of advanced reactors. EM Assistant Secretary Tim Walsh echoed that framing, emphasizing the chance to reduce the federal government’s own backlog of used fuel. Their statements, published alongside the DOE announcement, position the RFAs as both an energy policy initiative and a national security measure at a time when Russia and China are expanding their own nuclear fuel-cycle capabilities.
A half-century gap in U.S. reprocessing
The United States has not operated a commercial reprocessing facility since the early 1970s. The only plant that ever ran at commercial scale, Nuclear Fuel Services’ facility at West Valley, New York, processed spent fuel from 1966 to 1972 before shutting down over safety and economic concerns. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a policy directive indefinitely deferring commercial reprocessing, driven largely by fears that separating plutonium from spent fuel could enable nuclear weapons proliferation. Subsequent administrations loosened the rhetoric but never restarted the industry.
Meanwhile, other nations pressed ahead. France’s La Hague plant has reprocessed spent fuel continuously since the 1970s and today handles used fuel from reactors across Europe and Asia. The United Kingdom, Russia, and Japan have also operated reprocessing programs of varying scale. The U.S. decision to step back left the country reliant on a once-through fuel cycle, with spent assemblies accumulating in cooling pools and dry cask storage at more than 70 reactor sites, plus federal holdings at Hanford and Idaho.
Congress authorized a permanent geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, in 2002, but political opposition stalled the project. No administration since has revived it in a meaningful way. That impasse is a key reason reprocessing is back on the policy agenda: if the country cannot bury its spent fuel, recycling it into new reactor fuel offers an alternative path that also reduces the volume and long-term radioactivity of what remains.
How the program would work
Reprocessing, in its simplest terms, means chemically separating the still-usable fissile material in spent fuel from the highly radioactive waste products that build up during reactor operation. DOE envisions private facilities that would recover uranium and potentially plutonium from irradiated assemblies, then fabricate that recovered material into fuel for advanced reactor designs such as sodium-cooled fast reactors or molten salt systems.
The legal definition of spent nuclear fuel is central to the program’s structure. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, SNF is fuel that has been withdrawn from a reactor and whose constituent elements have not been separated by reprocessing, as DOE’s Office of Environmental Management explains on its page describing DOE-managed fuel. Once used fuel is reprocessed, it changes legal and regulatory category, which affects storage obligations, waste classification, and federal liability. In practice, that shift could alter how much long-term responsibility the government bears for material that has passed through a private recycling plant.
DOE’s program materials indicate the department intends to evaluate industry proposals, select partners, and coordinate with other agencies under the framework established by EO 14299. But the solicitations describe an authorization pathway and seek proposals; they do not, on their own, guarantee construction of any facility.
Unanswered questions facing the industry
Several significant unknowns could determine whether the RFAs lead to operating plants or remain a policy aspiration.
Funding. DOE has not disclosed cost estimates or funding allocations tied to either solicitation. The announcements seek industry proposals but do not specify how much federal money, if any, would flow to selected applicants. Given that reprocessing plants are capital-intensive, multi-billion-dollar facilities with long development timelines, the absence of clear financial commitments will weigh heavily on prospective bidders.
Licensing. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would oversee any commercial reprocessing plant, has acknowledged gaps in its own regulatory framework for such facilities. The NRC’s public materials on reprocessing reference ongoing work on the licensing basis, but the agency has not issued a complete, modern rule set for commercial-scale fuel recycling. Any company that wins a DOE authorization would still face a separate, potentially lengthy NRC licensing process before breaking ground. For investors and community stakeholders, that distinction matters: a DOE selection is an important milestone, but it is not a construction permit.
Proliferation safeguards. The Carter-era halt was rooted in nonproliferation concerns, and those concerns have not disappeared. Separating plutonium from spent fuel creates material that, without rigorous safeguards, could theoretically be diverted for weapons use. DOE’s current framing emphasizes national security benefits and energy independence, but no detailed public statement from the administration has laid out what safeguards regime would apply to privately operated separation plants or how recovered materials would be tracked once fabricated into advanced reactor fuel. International Atomic Energy Agency protocols and existing NRC material-control requirements provide a starting framework, but adapting them to a new generation of commercial facilities will require specific rulemaking.
Environmental review. Large nuclear facilities typically require environmental impact statements under the National Environmental Policy Act. No EIS specific to the proposed recycling plants has been released alongside the RFAs. Whether DOE will prepare a broad programmatic review covering multiple potential sites or rely on project-specific analyses after selecting applicants remains unclear. That choice will shape both the timeline and the degree of public participation in siting decisions.
Scale and inventory. The specific volumes of spent fuel at Hanford and Idaho National Laboratory that would be eligible for private reprocessing have not been itemized in publicly available program materials, though both sites hold significant inventories of government-owned used fuel. Without clearer figures, potential applicants must estimate the scale of government-supplied feedstock they could access.
What the RFAs do and do not guarantee
The strongest evidence of federal intent comes directly from DOE’s own publications. The Office of Nuclear Energy’s announcement and the Advanced Nuclear Fuel Recycling Program page are primary documents that confirm the RFAs were issued, name the responsible officials, and tie the effort to a specific executive order. Executive Order 14299 itself, available through the White House website and archived by the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, provides the legal authority DOE cites.
But executive orders can be rescinded or modified by a future administration, which means the private-sector authorization pathway rests on presidential direction rather than legislation passed by Congress. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act governs the broader statutory framework for spent fuel but does not itself mandate or prohibit reprocessing. That leaves substantial discretion to DOE and the NRC in interpreting how recycling facilities fit within existing law, and it leaves the program vulnerable to political shifts.
No independent cost-benefit analysis of commercial reprocessing has been released alongside the RFAs. No environmental impact statement has been published. No detailed timeline for selecting awardees or beginning construction has been announced. These gaps do not invalidate the program, but they mean the April 2026 solicitations represent a starting gun rather than a finish line. The policy direction is set. The practical contours, including who will build what, where, on what schedule, and at whose expense, remain to be defined.
For an industry that has spent decades watching used fuel accumulate with no permanent solution in sight, even a starting gun carries weight. Whether private companies will bet billions on a program that still lacks firm funding, finalized regulations, and bipartisan legislative backing is the question that will determine whether this moment marks a genuine turning point or another chapter in the long, unresolved history of American nuclear waste policy.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
