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GE Research Nets $6.4M Grant to Help Recycle Nuclear Fuel

Scientists at GE Research in Niskayuna have been awarded a $6.4 million grant from the Department of Energy's research arm to develop new technologies to recycle spent fuel from nuclear power plants in the United States.

Nuclear Cooling Tower
(TNS) — Scientists at GE Research in Niskayuna have been awarded a $6.4 million grant from the Department of Energy's research arm to develop new technologies to recycle spent fuel from nuclear power plants in the United States.

The project is part of a larger, $48 million program created by the DOE's early-stage research funding arm called Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, otherwise known as ARPA-E.

The program is called Converting UNF Radioisotopes into Energy, or CURIE, which is also a nod to French Nobel Prize-winning scientist and radioactivity pioneer Marie Curie.

GE Research, which has its main lab in the town of Niskayuna, is the research and development arm of General Electric Co., which employs thousands of people in the Capital Region.

U.S. nuclear power plants currently generate about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel every year. U.S. currently does not recycle, or reprocess, that spent fuel, which is a solid, and it is stored at 70 containment sites in 35 states instead.

However, a new generation of so-called advanced nuclear reactors built in the U.S. could be powered by recycled spent fuel, which could also have other commercial users.

The CURIE program comes at a time when the country is trying to move to zero carbon emissions to combat climate change, and nuclear power is considered to be an important tool to reach those goals. But recycling spent nuclear fuel also has risks — since if the fuel gets in the wrong hands, it can be used for weapons as well, which is why special security measures are needed to reprocess the fuel and make it commercially viable.

"CURIE will fuel advanced reactors and provide important clean energy elements, all while drastically reducing waste," Jennifer Gerbi, ARPA-E's acting director said back in March when CURIE was announced. "With this new program, we're emphasizing safeguards and lowered costs as we provide clean energy technology options for the future."

GE Research will use its $6.4 million grant from ARPA-E to create a so-called digital twin of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that would be used by operators at a real-life reprocessing plant to understand at all times how much fuel is in the system — much like a warehouse keeps track of inventory or how a bank keeps track of all the money in its possession. GE is working with established nuclear fuel reprocessing companies to help build the digital twin,

Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants in other countries have to often shut down operations to do physical checks of the fuel, and GE's digital twin could eliminate the need for longer outages, saving money and allowing more fuel to be recycled more quickly. GE's system will also provide upgraded security safeguards of the data in the plants using block chain encryption.

"We're aiming to develop a unique solution that would enable facility reprocessing operators to keep the tracking and measurements of used fuel flowing in the pipes of the facilities themselves," said Bogdan Neculaes, a principal scientist at GE Research and the project leader. "This has the potential to yield estimated savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually in operating costs while enabling more used fuel to be recycled with enhanced safeguards."

Those 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel can actually fit inside an Olympic-sized swimming pool, according to DOE, because they are so dense. But they also retain about 90 percent of their energy capacity even after five years of use in a nuclear power plant, meaning that the yearly amount of spent fuel put into storage in the U.S. each year could power 70 million home with no carbon emissions.

© 2022 the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.