DOE Announces New ARPA-E Opportunity for Advanced Reactor Waste Management | Hogan Lovells

Last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced a new funding program launched by the Agency for Advanced Research Projects (ARPA-E). An impressive US $ 40 million has been allocated to support the new Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems (ONWARDS) program. This endeavor will focus on avoiding or reducing nuclear waste and improving disposal options. The aim is a 10-fold reduction in nuclear waste through the following three options mentioned in the press release:

1. process: Improvements in fuel recycling that significantly minimize the volume of waste, improve intrinsic proliferation resistance, increase resource consumption and promote the advanced commercialization of reactors.
2. Protective measures: Improvements in sensor and data fusion technologies that enable accurate and timely detection of core materials.
3. Waste form: Development of high performance waste forms for all advanced reactor classes with an emphasis on those forms that span multiple reactor classes and disposal environments and are safe and stable for the required time periods.

Following the announcement, ARPA-E released a Funding Opportunities (FOA) announcement for the ONWARDS program, stating that selected applicants will “develop and demonstrate sustainable technologies that will significantly improve the disposal effects of used nuclear fuel (UNF) and other waste streams the implementation of [advanced reactor] Fuel cycles by developing innovative and cost-effective approaches to reprocessing, materials accounting and waste forms. “A second, nearly identical FOA (with different admission requirements) is also being released as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs managed by ARPA-E. Concept papers for each FOA are due July 9, 2021.

This ARPA-E opportunity addresses a critical question of how advanced nuclear power plants can address the challenging problem of spent fuel and high level waste management. Although nuclear power plant owners and operators have allocated billions of dollars to spent fuel management, these funds will remain largely empty until the federal government can decide where to build a nuclear waste repository. The ONWARDS program could help solve this problem by reducing the amount of waste that modern reactors generally generate. One of the options considered – the use of fuel recycling – may prove complex, given possible proliferation concerns. However, new technologies for fuel recycling can significantly improve the safety of the recycling process and at the same time drastically reduce the amount of fuel disposed of. The NRC has attempted to set regulations for the use of fuel recycling, although NRC staff recently requested to end the rule-making and may instead use the 10 CFR Part 50 framework for all recycling plant applications submitted to the agency.

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