Electricity Generation and Delivery

Oklo aims to commercialize a state-of-the-art nuclear fuel recycling facility within the next few years. The facility would produce fuel for Oklo’s metal-fueled fast reactors, closing the advanced reactor fuel cycle and changing the economic paradigm for advanced fission with a commercial-scale fuel recycling facility.

Deep Isolation will develop a universal canister design compatible with waste acceptance criteria for mined and borehole repositories to support cost-effective nuclear waste disposal options and provide flexibility for a broad range of advanced fuel forms and recycling products. The conventional nuclear fuel dry storage canisters in use today will likely require repackaging or reconfiguring before disposal. Deep Isolation’s new universal canister will create an elemental waste form component that will decouple the interdependent constraints between storage, transport, and disposal.

General Electric (GE) Global Research, with Lumitron Technologies and Idaho State University, will develop an innovative active interrogation technique, Resonance Absorption Densitometry for Materials Assay Security Safeguards (RADMASS), which can penetrate advanced reactor fuel (dense solid actinides) and measure fissile mass density (<1% uncertainty) on the order of minutes or less while being insensitive to high background radiation.

Chloride salts possess different levels of volatility at high temperatures, which can be used in targeted separations. TerraPower proposes to use a chloride-based volatility (CBV) process to separate uranium from used nuclear fuel (UNF), and investigate tunable CBV parameters to achieve a high degree of uranium recovery and thereby reduce waste volumes. Work will begin with surrogate oxide and molten salt used nuclear fuels and subsequently progress to demonstration with actual oxide UNF. CBV can be applied to metallic-, oxide-, and salt-based reactor fuels.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) will explore using inorganic metal halide perovskites (MHPs) as advanced salt waste forms to immobilize fluoride-based salt wastes from advanced reactors. The RPI team will demonstrate low-temperature wet-chemistry processes to effectively separate fluoride salt wastes at temperatures lower than 200oC and reduce the waste volume of alkali and alkaline earth fluoride salt waste by 90 l.%. The second technical goal is to separate useful lithium fluoride from the fluoride salt wastes with a yield over 95%.

Citrine Informatics will use a combination of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, physics-based simulations, and experimental results to design novel phosphate waste forms (including glasses, ceramics, and their composites) to enable dehalogenation (removal of halides) and more secure immobilization of salt waste from molten salt reactors (MSRs). Current disposition pathways for salt wastes from MSRs, or used nuclear fuel reprocessing, produce waste forms with relatively low halide loading potential, large volumes, poor thermal stability, and poor mechanical durability.

Brigham Young University (BYU) will apply two-step chloride volatility (TSCV) to co-extract uranium (U) and transuranics (TRU) in a solventless, gas-solid separation scheme to reduce waste volumes and repository footprint by 10x. The BYU team will reduce risks and uncertainty of the TSCV process by quantifying the volatility of U/TRU chlorides in simulated UNF mixtures, optimizing process parameters for U/TRU extraction, and demonstrating TSCV up to a one-kilogram batch size.

Precision Combustion (PCI) proposes an innovative modular array to eliminate the release of ventilation air methane (VAM) associated with coal production. The team’s technology combines (1) a short contact time, low thermal mass reactor design to achieve high methane conversion in a small volume, (2) catalyst formulation and loading to minimize the required operating temperature of the oxidation reactor, and (3) system design and architecture to maximize the degree to which released heat is retained and recirculated.

Cimarron Energy aims to develop a cost-competitive flare and control system to achieve over 99.5% methane destruction and removal efficiency (DRE) from the current 98% DRE. The proposed system will include a novel flare apparatus to overcome all observed difficulties in achieving high DRE for flares, a microprocessor based electronic controller, an image-based closed-loop feedback system, and flow meters for high-pressure (HP) and low-pressure (LP) flare gas streams sent to the flare. The HP gas is associated with oil extraction and contains a large fraction of methane.

Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT) proposes an innovative Swiss-roll incinerator that effectively recuperates the heat from combustion products to fully combust the flare gas over a wide range of flow rates and concentrations. ACT's design comprises a spiral heat exchanger surrounding the incinerator, which effectively minimizes the heat losses from flue gas, incinerator wall convection, and radiation. The excess enthalpy in the reactants significantly extends the range of flammable mixtures to provide a complete methane combustion.