Texas A&M wins $5.4 million federal grant to study turning used nuclear fuel into new reactor fuel

The U.S. Department of Energy is giving Texas A&M $5.4 million for research into whether spent fuel from nuclear reactors can be recycled into fresh reactor fuel.

James Danly, the U.S. deputy energy secretary, announced the award Thursday during a stop on the College Station campus, KBTX and KXXV reported. The recipient is the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, known as TEES.

The project

The research is titled "Turning Nuclear Waste into Fuel with a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor." It is led by Lin Shao, a professor in Texas A&M's Department of Nuclear Engineering, and also involves Savannah River National Laboratory and the company Natura Resources, KBTX reported, citing a university news release.

According to Danly, the grant is one share of $50 million the department is awarding for nuclear fuel studies at universities nationwide. He told KBTX that A&M's proposal "was one of the best applications."

Robert Bishop, who leads Texas A&M Engineering as its dean and a vice chancellor, said the money is expected to begin flowing in a couple of months and will support a three-year project. He stressed that the grant pays for research and will not produce electricity for the power grid, KBTX reported.

Why recycling matters

Spent nuclear fuel in the United States is generally stored rather than reused. Danly described it as material long treated as a burden that in fact "still has 98% of its useful value in it."

Bishop said recycling could cut how much spent fuel has to be held in long-term storage. "You don't just use the fuel and then store it for millions of years; you can recycle it," he told KXXV.

Danly said the administration wants to grow the country's nuclear power output substantially, which he said would eventually lower electricity costs. "His vision is to quadruple the total amount of nuclear in America in just a matter of a couple of decades," he told KXXV, referring to the president.

A nuclear engineering doctoral student at A&M told KBTX that France has recycled used fuel for decades, but that the United States has not built that capacity, and that it will take years of research to learn whether the approach works here.

University officials said they expect to be able to judge the project's results after its three years.

Sources

KBTX

kxxv.com