The U.S. Department of Energy is directing tens of millions of dollars toward a goal that would have seemed far-fetched a decade ago: developing ways to reuse some of the nation’s used nuclear fuel as a future power source for advanced reactors. Federal scientists and private companies say much of the potential energy in used fuel remains untapped, and they are funding research to recover more of it. The effort comes as no commercial reprocessing facilities operate anywhere in the country, making the distance between ambition and reality a central tension in the push for nuclear expansion.
Billions in Waste, Billions in Untapped Energy
Current U.S. reactors burn through uranium fuel rods and leave behind material that still contains the vast majority of its original energy content. The DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy has framed this used fuel as an untapped resource, awarding $19 million to advance recycling research aimed at recovering that energy. A separate allocation of $10 million is backing earlier-stage approaches to used-fuel recycling, with the explicit acknowledgment that the U.S. does not currently encourage commercial reprocessing of spent fuel. Together, these funding rounds signal a deliberate federal strategy to treat spent fuel not as a disposal problem but as a feedstock opportunity for advanced reactors that could operate for decades on what is now considered waste.
The logic is straightforward but the execution is not. Recycling used fuel could shrink waste volumes and extend uranium supplies, but the U.S. has no commercial infrastructure to do it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirms that no commercial reprocessing plants currently operate in the country, and any move toward commercial reprocessing would require navigating NRC licensing and oversight. Reprocessing also generates its own waste streams, as the NRC notes in its guidance on high-level waste, and federal law and regulations shape how those byproducts must be managed. So while the science may be ready to advance, the regulatory and industrial scaffolding is largely absent, leaving DOE-funded projects to operate at research scale rather than as part of a coherent national fuel cycle.
Idaho’s Retired Reactor Becomes a Fuel Factory
The most concrete example of waste-to-fuel conversion is underway at Idaho National Laboratory, where scientists are processing spent fuel from the retired Experimental Breeder Reactor-II, known as EBR-II. Using electrochemical techniques, the team recovers uranium from the old metallic fuel assemblies and downblends it into high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, a specialized material enriched to less than 20 percent uranium-235. HALEU is not used in current U.S. commercial reactors, but it is considered essential for many advanced reactor designs now in development. INL has said the process could yield up to about 10 metric tons of HALEU, with the DOE retaining ownership and the material staying on the INL site under federal controls.
Idaho National Laboratory selected the startup Oklo Inc. for an opportunity to demonstrate reuse of this recovered fuel material, a partnership that puts a private company at the front of a government-led supply chain. In its announcement of the collaboration, INL emphasized that recovered EBR-II fuel could help validate microreactor concepts that rely on HALEU. The arrangement highlights an acknowledged gap: domestic HALEU availability remains limited, and advanced reactor developers cannot build or test their designs without it. A separate DOE environmental decision issued in April 2025 authorized the blending down of approximately 2.2 metric tons of highly enriched uranium into about 3.1 metric tons of HALEU at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, with the resulting liquid to be transported to an offsite commercial vendor, according to DOE’s amended record of decision (DOE NEPA decision). The DOE’s Office of Environmental Management also restarted uranium recovery operations at the SRS H Canyon facility, framing the work as supporting advanced reactor fuel supply while reducing legacy material inventories (DOE EM).
Why Recycling Alone Will Not Solve the Fuel Shortage
Even with Idaho and Savannah River producing HALEU from legacy government stockpiles, the volumes remain small relative to what a commercial fleet of advanced reactors would need. The Piketon, Ohio, facility operated by Centrus Energy Corp. holds a separate NRC license for HALEU demonstration enrichment up to 19.75 percent uranium-235, representing the only other active domestic pathway. But demonstration quantities and commercial-scale supply are very different things, and no primary data in public DOE or NRC records projects when recycled or downblended HALEU could meet a significant share of demand. The DOE’s broader planning effort for advanced nuclear, including initiatives cataloged on its Genesis platform, underscores that fuel availability is a foundational constraint for any near-term deployment scenario.
The broader challenge is that recycling used fuel from conventional light-water reactors, which make up the existing U.S. fleet, requires different chemistry and facilities than processing EBR-II’s metallic fuel. The $19 million and $10 million DOE awards are funding research into those techniques, but commercialization timelines are unclear and will depend on both technical milestones and regulatory approvals. Meanwhile, the country still lacks a permanent repository for existing high-level waste, a political and regulatory stalemate that has persisted for decades. Recycling could reduce waste volumes, but it does not eliminate them, and any reprocessing operation will produce its own secondary waste streams that require disposal under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That reality keeps long-term storage at the center of the policy debate even as engineers work to turn a portion of the waste into new fuel.
Beyond Reactors: Hydrogen and Public Imagination
The potential uses for nuclear waste extend beyond reactor fuel. Researchers reported in November 2025 that, based on existing studies, certain nuclear byproducts could significantly enhance the efficiency of photocatalytic systems for hydrogen production by improving material performance and lowering overall costs. While this work remains at the laboratory stage, it points to a future in which isotopes now destined for disposal might instead support low-carbon hydrogen, a fuel often cited as critical for decarbonizing heavy industry and long-distance transport. Such concepts broaden the conversation about what “waste” means in a nuclear context and whether some streams should be reclassified as strategic resources.
At the same time, public perception remains a major barrier to any expanded use of nuclear materials, whether for power, hydrogen, or other applications. Recognizing that technical arguments alone have not resolved the impasse over long-term storage, researchers and artists have collaborated on creative projects to help communities imagine different futures for radioactive materials. One Arizona State University initiative, for example, uses speculative fiction to explore scenarios in which communities co-design solutions to the nuclear waste challenge, with a science-fiction narrative framing why a permanent disposal solution has stalled for decades. These efforts underscore that turning waste into fuel is not just a technical problem but a social one, requiring trust, transparency, and a shared vision of what a nuclear-powered future should look like.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
