Electricity Generation and Delivery

NuVision Engineering will design, build, commission, and operate an integrated material accountancy test platform that will predict post-process nuclear material accountancy within 1% uncertainty for an aqueous reprocessing plant. Current U.S. reprocessing plants utilize commercial process equipment for pumping, mixing, and sampling that requires regular maintenance and replacement due to radiolytic degradation of seals and other non-metallic components.

EPRI will research an integrated fuel cycle enterprise, intended to address the coupled challenges of nuclear fuel life-cycle management and AR fuel supply. Input LWR fuel source options and process step options for recycling that produces fuel for ARs such as a molten chloride fast reactor (MCFR) will be characterized and evaluated. EPRI will use this information to develop recycling optimization tool to evaluate the many viable process options for their compatibility and efficiency.

Texas Tech University will develop accurate materials fabrication, characterization, and analysis to attempt to resolve the physical understanding of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). Texas Tech will also provide advanced detection of nuclear reaction products as a resource for ARPA-E LENR Exploratory Topic teams.

General Electric (GE) Global Research, in partnership with Lumitron Technologies, Orano, and Sandia National Laboratory, will research an innovative safeguards solution, Monochromatic Assays Yielding Enhanced Reliability (MAYER), for aqueous reprocessing.

Stanford University will explore a technical solution based on LENR-active nanoparticles and gaseous deuterium. The team seeks to alleviate critical impediments to test the hypothesis that LENR-active sites in metal nanoparticles can be created through exposure to deuterium gas.

Energetics Technology Center will build upon past successes with co-deposition experiments using palladium, lithium, and heavy water together to create an environment in which LENR can occur. These electrolysis experiments decrease the distance from the cathode (location of LENR) to an electronic detector capable of detecting nuclear reaction products to give these experiments the best chance at reliably detecting nuclear reactions, if they are present.

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) will design, fabricate, and test robust anode materials for recovering actinide elements from used LWR fuels through a molten salt electrochemical process. Current anode materials, which are typically fabricated from either platinum or graphite, are expensive, degrade rapidly, contaminate the reduced actinide product, and generate greenhouse gases when used to manufacture metallic products.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) team proposes to probe for LENR at external excitation energies below 500 eV, systematically varying materials and conditions while monitoring nuclear event rates with a suite of diagnostics. The team will draw from knowledge based on previous work using higher energy ion beams as an external excitation source for LENR on metal hydrides electrochemically loaded with deuterium.

The University of Michigan proposes to systematically evaluate claims of excess heat generation during deuteration and correlate it to nuclear and chemical reaction products. The team plans to combine scintillation-based neutron and gamma ray detectors, mass spectrometers, a calorimeter capable of performing microwatt-resolution measurements of heat generation, and ab-initio computational approaches. The proposed research will experimentally and theoretically explore the origin and mechanisms of excess heat generation and LENR.

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) will research an electrochemical oxide reduction (OR) process that meets CURIE’s cost and waste metrics for a pyroprocessing facility. Electrochemical OR is a single-step process that converts used oxide fuels to metal that can be electrorefined to produce uranium/transuranic (U/TRU) alloys suitable for fabrication into advanced reactor fuels. However, current process inefficiencies result in non-uniform and incomplete conversion to metal, long process times, and large waste volumes.