Nuclear Recycling Is Not a Panacea

Along the golden coast of Southern California, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is a well-known—perhaps equally revered and feared—piece of the region’s history. The nuclear reactor began operating in 1968 and has long guided surfers to beloved breaks along its beachfront. It has also been the source of much political strife among safety-concerned locals, plant employees, and elected officials. SONGS permanently closed in 2013 following a small leak of radioactive steam. Today, it stands as a symbol of a failing U.S. policy to find a permanent solution to irradiated fuel from its nuclear power plants.

A nascent boom in nuclear energy demand—driven by big tech’s energy-hungry data centers—has catapulted nuclear power and the spent-fuel problem back into the laps of public officials. A May 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump promoting nuclear power highlights recycling as a possible solution. But the record on recycling is mixed, at best, and the option currently doesn’t exist in the United States. Without focused policy solutions, the United States could be counting on an unproven and temporary solution to a long-term and growing problem.

A Growing Problem

Currently, 3.55 million pounds of irradiated fuel reside in SONGS’s temporary dry-cask storage—a safe and technologically sound approach to letting spent fuel slowly cool. But dry-cask storage was never meant to be a permanent solution for addressing the plant’s radioactive waste stream, and the used fuel dilemma at SONGS is only one piece of the larger spent nuclear fuel problem the United States has ignored for far too long. Without a permanent spent-fuel management solution on the horizon, the fuel at SONGS and seventy-nine other U.S. nuclear power plants with on-site spent fuel storage remains in limbo, effectively turning these operating and shuttered power plants into de facto waste storage locations.

This situation is problematic enough. But with growing support and demand for nuclear energy usage in the United States in the next quarter-century, spent fuel will accumulate at an even faster rate.

A recent Goldman Sachs report suggests that power demands from data centers alone are estimated to increase 165 percent globally by 2030. Technology companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are coping by aggressively procuring energy from any available source. For nuclear power, they are supporting the extension or recommissioning of existing nuclear power plants and investing in new projects to come online over the next decade. In addition, Trump’s May 23, 2025, executive orders solidify the prominent role of nuclear power in the future of American energy strategy. This growing support often is coupled with optimism about how advances in technology might at some point in the future address the spent fuel conundrum—especially recycling.

Recycling to the Rescue?

Recycling spent nuclear fuel involves the separation—also called reprocessing—of uranium and/or plutonium from other radioactive elements and reusing them as reactor fuel. Some of the Silicon Valley–backed nuclear energy startups, such as Oklo, have secured government funding for reactor designs that explicitly incorporate reprocessed materials into fresh fuel. Oklo is also among those aiming to build demonstration recycling facilities at U.S. national laboratory sites.

However, the record on recycling is mixed, and the technology would need to overcome a range of obstacles and risks to succeed, as recently highlighted in the Washington Post. It also does not obviate the need for a final repository for waste material that will remain highly radioactive for millennia.

Today, France and (in theory) Japan have commercial programs to separate and reuse uranium and plutonium from irradiated fuel and then consolidate the remaining waste for permanent storage. (Russia’s state-owned nuclear enterprises also reprocess spent fuel.) Their experiences highlight the numerous issues that the United States would have to confront.

France is arguably the most advanced in nuclear fuel recycling. It is beginning to use the reprocessed uranium to fuel certain nuclear power plants, while it refabricates the plutonium into a new mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel that also can be reused in some power plants. France rightly boasts its advances in civil nuclear energy research and development, with 10 percent of France’s nuclear reactor fleet fueled by MOX.

However, the used MOX fuel is still stored indefinitely, though it may in the future also be reused pending the planned development of more advanced fast neutron reactor designs. If these reactors can be built—previous efforts have largely failed for political, economic, and technical reasons—the fast reactor fuel cycle promises to further shrink the waste volume. Studies project that these efforts might add only about 10 percent to power cost, although nuclear projects are often overbudget, sometimes massively so.

Despite its extensive recycling program, 4 percent of France’s high-level nuclear waste (HLW) is incompatible with existing recycling techniques and is stored in dry casks. France has taken an important step in identifying Meuse/Haute-Marne as a planned deep geological repository site for its HLW. Construction may begin in 2028, with targeted completion in 2050.

Japan has worked for decades to establish a similar program, but it has suffered numerous setbacks. Japan stores its irradiated fuel in several facilities on an interim basis, including at Rokkasho, where it is constructing a massive reprocessing plant and MOX facility. Plans for a permanent repository have remained at the pre-siting stage since 2002, and the opening of the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant project was recently delayed for the twenty-seventh time since construction began in 1993.

For many years, Japan shipped its irradiated fuel to France and the UK for reprocessing and MOX fuel fabrication. But since 1999, it has stored them locally in anticipation of Rokkasho’s opening. As a result of the delays and shutdown of its nuclear power plants after the 2011 accident at the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear power station, Japan reported having an excess of 8.7 tons of separated plutonium, with an additional surplus of 35.8 tons of the material in France and the United Kingdom waiting to be returned. Like France, Japan does not currently have a clear plan for what to do with the spent MOX fuel, with its efforts to construct fast reactors also perpetually troubled.

Despite their progress, Japan and France have been working on these programs for decades, and they should serve as cautionary tales that recycling fuel is neither an easy nor a near-term solution to accumulating stocks of irradiated fuel.

Lessons From Home

The U.S. history with reprocessing also points to challenges and suggests the need for caution. During World War II, at the Manhattan Project’s Hanford site in Eastern Washington, the United States reprocessed irradiated fuel to recover weapons-usable plutonium (which is different than commercial recycling of nuclear power plant fuel, but still a relevant example). This plutonium eventually made its way into the bomb dropped by the United States on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

After the war, the continued separation of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons resulted in enormous environmental problems. The 56 million gallons of both highly radioactive and chemical waste left behind is today unsustainably stored in underground tanks. It has required one of the most expensive environmental cleanup projects worldwide, with an estimated cost of $300 billion to $640 billion. Moreover, the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at Hanford—which is set to turn 60 percent of the site’s low-activity waste into glass for simplified storage—could cost an additional $33 billion to $42 billion to complete. So in addition to dealing with the byproducts of irradiated fuel, recycling will also generate more highly radioactive waste that will need to be stored.

The United States has tried commercial reprocessing of spent power plant fuel before, but a combination of rising costs and concerns about global stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium led to the shuttering of the only three U.S. commercial reprocessing facilities between 1966 and 1977.

In addition, efforts to build a permanent spent fuel repository are moribund after the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada, leaving effectively no long-term nuclear waste strategy in the United States. The Department of Energy has conducted research on repositories in several different geologic areas, but identifying a specific site and building it appears to be a distant possibility. So at the moment, all U.S. spent nuclear fuel is stored in steel-lined pools and, eventually, dry casks—which have a 100-year expiry date.

Radioactive Reality Check

The Trump administration’s executive order on recycling nuclear fuel promises that a “policy to support the management of spent nuclear fuel” will be devised, but it fails to offer any real parameters for a permanent storage policy. And even if the administration is able to launch full-scale nuclear recycling, the resulting waste will still need a long-term storage solution that does not exist and is not in the works.

The experiences of France and Japan, not to mention the grave environmental consequences of recycling seen at the Hanford site, point to the need for policymakers to exercise caution when presented with arguments about the upsides of reprocessing and recycling to manage nuclear waste. Similarly, the 3.55 million pounds of nuclear waste sitting in temporary dry-cask storage at SONGS, and millions more at other sites around the country, underscore the critical need for a permanent geological repository solution. After years of delay, managing nuclear spent fuel should not again be punted for future generations to solve.