The Trump administration’s May 2025 executive orders calling for increased nuclear energy output marked a watershed moment for the industry. The results have been nothing short of astounding. In less than a year, the U.S. government has announced multibillion-dollar awards for domestic uranium enrichment projects, unlocked surplus plutonium for reactor use, and launched the reactor pilot program, with eleven projects racing to go critical by July 2026. On the regulatory side, the entire Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) code is being rewritten from the ground up to fix the sclerosis that has strangled every major nuclear project for the last half-century, with major changes to be announced this quarter.
In the private sector, industry has responded with a surge in new capital expenditure and investment, including restarts of major reactors, commitments to new starts, and capital raises across the advanced nuclear ecosystem. The significance of these tectonic shifts in the policy landscape has been confirmed several times over by the $5 billion in capital raises by venture-backed startups and cost-sharing agreements in the nuclear industry over the last year.
But a critical pillar of the nuclear renaissance still needs to be delivered on. Simply building a network of new reactors will not solve America’s energy challenges. Without a secure, sovereign, and affordable fuel supply for the reactor fleet, America’s future nuclear industrial base runs the risk of being more of a national liability than a national asset. Addressing longstanding vulnerabilities in the nuclear fuel cycle is just as important as eliminating the red tape that has delayed new reactor starts for decades.
To meet this challenge, U.S. policymakers would be well advised to rethink a long-criticized and misunderstood technology: nuclear fuel recycling. While recycling does not fully solve the problem of domestic nuclear fuel production, its deployment would represent meaningful progress toward a closed fuel cycle and strengthen American energy dominance at home and abroad. Specifically, recycled fuel will help ensure that the deployment of advanced reactors does not hinge on the availability of foreign imported uranium, especially from Russia.
With operational recycling plants, commercial reactor companies would be able to generate new fuel from spent fuel rods, thereby reducing federal spending on waste management and slashing the American ratepayer’s contribution to this costly activity. Domestic recycling capacity would pave the way for a fuel lease-back program, boosting U.S. nuclear exports and curbing Russian — and increasingly Chinese — influence in the global nuclear market. Combined, these changes would generate needed momentum for advanced nuclear projects, such as fast reactors, and to avoid repeats of past failures amid the nuclear industry’s emerging renaissance.
America’s reactor fleet is already sizable, with nuclear generating nearly one-fifth of the nation’s annual total electricity. By volume, the United States generates more electricity from nuclear than any other country on earth. But when it comes to domestic uranium production, America lags behind. The United States mines less than 1 percent of the uranium needed to meet existing domestic reactor fuel requirements. The only uranium conversion facility in the United States was shuttered from 2017 to 2023 as global prices plummeted. Today, there is just one large-scale, operational U.S. commercial uranium enrichment facility. It has the capacity to enrich approximately one-third of the country’s annual reactor requirements.Recent Department of Energy (DOE) awards to Orano, Centrus, and General Matter will help bootstrap the construction of domestic enrichment capacity. Yet recycling remains the missing link — the essential next step America must take to develop a sustainable, mature, and comprehensive nuclear ecosystem.
The hollowing out of America’s nuclear fuel supply chain has created a dangerous dependence on foreign uranium imports. Moreover, among the world’s top ten uranium producers, the United States can count only two stalwart allies: Canada and Australia. Aside from those two, America and the rest of the world depend on uranium from countries in either China’s or Russia’s spheres of influence, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Niger. The latter was destabilized by a Russian-backed coup d’état in 2023, a shock to France, which depends on Niger for 25 percent of its uranium supply and subsequently withdrew military advisors and diplomats from its former colony. Relying on these countries for uranium production in a world of mounting geopolitical instability is not a recipe for energy dominance. But without a reliable source of domestic nuclear fuel, our dependence will continue to grow over the coming years as the nuclear fleet expands.
Nuclear recycling, known in the industry as “reprocessing,” offers a solution for this critical vulnerability. The basic technology has existed for decades. The traditional PUREX method was developed under the aegis of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s and refined in the 1950s to recover pure plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Recycling simply reapplied the method for use on spent fuel from commercial reactors. For the past fifty years, the world’s advanced nuclear energy nations have been leveraging this approach to bolster their fuel supplies, and to reduce the burden of storing spent fuel. France began using recycled fuel from its La Hague reprocessing site in the 1970s, and its majority state-owned nuclear fuel cycle developer Orano is today the world’s third-largest uranium producer, accounting for 11 percent of global uranium production. China, Japan, and Russia operate nuclear fuel recycling programs. For most of the world’s atomic energy-producing states, recycling is a fundamental link in the fuel cycle.
The United States, on the other hand, has spent the last half-century erecting regulatory and financial barriers to the development of commercial recycling plants: this is in spite of the fact that the fissionable energy retained inside spent nuclear fuel rods is arguably the most strategic and untapped energy resource available to American industry. Indeed, to call spent fuel “spent” is a misnomer. Of the ninety-four thousand metric tons of spent fuel that is now held securely within concrete casks or wet storage pools, 95 percent of the material could be transformed into usable fuel.
In total, the latent energy inside America’s stockpile of civilian and military nuclear waste is greater than that of Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves. By some estimates, if advanced reprocessing technology were combined with the deployment of next-generation fast reactors (of which the United States currently has none), spent fuel reserves could meet all U.S. energy needs for one hundred years. Nuclear recycling with the latest methods would allow developers to access a gold mine of stored energy for civilian use, lay the foundations for a closed fuel cycle, and eliminate one of the most glaring chokepoints in the U.S. energy mix.
To achieve these gains, however, policymakers will have to move beyond lingering biases against reprocessing. In 2024, the American nuclear fusion lab SHINE Technologies and the French multinational nuclear giant Orano signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a U.S. nuclear recycling plant. That facility was scheduled to enter service in the early 2030s. But the project ran afoul of a Biden administration policy that tied reprocessing to concerns over nuclear proliferation. Non-proliferation advocates warned of security risks and urged the administration to withdraw federal support, citing “a half-century of U.S. abstention from civilian reprocessing.” It is a familiar refrain. In the United States, nuclear recycling has long been sidelined due to Cold War-era fears of nuclear proliferation, inconsistent policy stances, and the resulting cooling of interest from industry and investors.
In 1963, John F. Kennedy predicted that as many as twenty-five countries could attain nuclear weapons by 1975. The specter of proliferation haunted his successors and informed the trajectory of U.S. policy on the peaceful uses of atomic energy for decades. Although nuclear reprocessing was never banned outright or made illegal, presidential policy discouraged developers from pursuing the technology. No president or candidate wanted to be seen supporting technologies that could lead another state to join the already growing nuclear club.
In 1974, India’s Smiling Buddha nuclear test confirmed fears that reprocessing could be used to divert pure plutonium streams from a commercial power reactor, allowing a proliferator to build a bomb. Three years later, the newly elected Jimmy Carter announced his decision to “defer indefinitely” commercial reprocessing activity in the United States, a move that effectively terminated Department of Energy support for recycling.
Carter hoped to set an example for the rest of the world and position America as a good faith actor in subsequent arms control and non-proliferation agreements, but his policy had the effect of diminishing America’s standing in global nuclear commerce. In the 1970s, international buyers wanted not just reactors, but a credible end-to-end fuel supply. Instead of building storage capacity, many countries wanted to recycle waste for further use in reactors or simply lease fuel from a country that could recycle, avoiding the problem of waste management altogether. By halting the development of reprocessing, Carter’s policy kept U.S. companies from offering their international clients a closed fuel cycle. France and West Germany — key U.S. rivals for light-water reactor exports — had less restrictive reprocessing policies. Although Ronald Reagan rescinded Carter’s moratorium on reprocessing in 1981, the damage had been done.
Gas and oil prices declined sharply into the twenty-first century and new starts on reactors were abandoned due to rising financing costs. By the time the George W. Bush administration began to pursue recycling initiatives in 2005 and 2006, the industry was tired of riding the regulatory merry-go-round and forecast meager returns on the billions of dollars required to establish a robust recycling capacity. In the decades since, American nuclear companies have struggled to compete with foreign rivals, especially Russia’s Rosatom.
This history helps to explain America’s nuclear energy insecurity today. The lack of domestic recycling capacity has made the United States more reliant on foreign uranium, more wasteful in its spending on fuel cycle management, and more likely to fall behind in the race to secure export markets for advanced nuclear technologies like SMRs.
When the Damoclean sword of nuclear anarchy hung over the heads of American presidents, deferring the development of potentially risky commercial reprocessing capacity was rational, defensible, and politically shrewd. But today’s recycling technology has largely outgrown twentieth-century assumptions about safety and feasibility. Advanced pyroprocessing and other innovative techniques can now recover up to 95 percent of usable fissile material from spent fuel, turning high-level waste into a resource stream for new fuel. And because next-generation fast reactors do not need pure plutonium as fuel, the latest reprocessing methods pioneered by American companies cannot separate pure plutonium, alleviating concerns about proliferation that many in the nuclear policy community still harbor.
These advanced methods also reduce the volume and radiotoxicity lifetime of final waste that requires deep geological disposal or containment inside steel-lined concrete casks, easing long-term disposal concerns. With modular recycling systems, the cost and logistical barriers to large-scale adoption have lowered significantly. Together, these innovations mark a decisive shift. Nuclear recycling has matured beyond its fraught past into a viable pillar of sustainable energy policy.
Because the United States currently lacks an enrichment industry with sufficient capacity to meet domestic demand and so does not recycle nuclear waste, the domestic reactor fleet relies on imports at every stage of the supply chain, from mine to reactor. Russia has historically been the largest supplier of enriched uranium to the United States. This did not happen by accident: Russia’s currently indispensable role in the American nuclear fuel cycle was planned. Inaugurated in 1993, the Megatons-to-Megawatts program was conceived as a strategy to reduce the threat of loose nuclear weapons in the newly formed Russian Federation and stabilize the U.S.-Russia relationship through a bilateral exercise in non-proliferation. The Department of Energy and Defense Threat Reduction Agency program was envisioned as a solution to U.S. reactor fuel needs. And while it did have the positive effect of removing HEU from Russia, it also created a decades-long addiction to Russian uranium that today endangers American national security.
In the last decade of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear industry began to lose momentum. From 1980 to 1993, the United States lost more than half of its domestic uranium production capacity. Although the Megatons-to-Megawatts program successfully converted the equivalent of twenty thousand warheads of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium into low enriched uranium that fueled U.S. reactors, the influx of cheap Russian uranium also undercut American producers. A wave of enrichment facility closures across the country contributed to high decommissioning costs, as plants were deemed unlikely to reopen due to increasingly strict environmental rules and a glut in the global uranium market. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russian state-owned nuclear conglomerate Rosatom had become the world’s dominant nuclear fuel supplier, controlling 50 percent of the global market for enrichment and meeting 25 percent of U.S. demand.
Uranium imports are a strategic liability. A bipartisan 2024 ban on importing uranium products from Russia aimed to address this issue, encouraging the development of domestic enrichment and conversion capacity. The desired outcomes will take time to materialize, however, and some U.S. companies have continued to rely on Russian imports, receiving exemptions from the ban in order to sustain operations. In light of China’s decision to restrict exports of rare earth minerals, supply chains remain a major area of focus for national security planners. Policymakers searching for the next area where the U.S. economy could be squeezed by an adversary need look no further than dependencies on foreign uranium. Breaking the dependency on Chinese rare earths and magnets made of those metals will require a technological breakthrough in magnetization or a decades-long process to site, prospect, and build mines. Nuclear recycling technology already exists and could be deployed at scale within a decade.
There is ample reason to be concerned about the possibility of a U.S. nuclear squeeze. Russia flexed its uranium chokehold in 2024, imposing export controls on the sale of all uranium products to the United States as a response to American arms transfers to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China aims to surpass Russia in nuclear technology exports and fuel enrichment. Beijing currently has thirty rreactors under construction and is planning to build 150 additional units by 2035. China is also quietly building the infrastructure to control every stage of the global nuclear fuel cycle from enrichment to reactor sales, replicating the strategy that has catapulted Chinese companies and state-owned enterprises to market dominance in technologies ranging from high-speed rail to electric vehicles and industrial batteries.
End-to-end control of the nuclear supply chain would provide China with a strategic foothold in the global race to electrify industry, power AI data centers, and meet global demand for clean, cheap baseload power. With a nascent recycling industry of its own, Chinese uranium recycled from China’s own reactors could soon flood markets across the West.
Developing America’s advanced nuclear industry without a secure fuel supply will only perpetuate longstanding strategic weaknesses and trade one form of dependency for another. Meeting nuclear power goals should not mean becoming subordinate to the uranium supplies of any foreign nation. The net result of expanding nuclear energy in America without investing in recycling will be to make our country less energy secure and more vulnerable to coercion.
Nuclear waste disposal is a political challenge that has vexed every generation of American policymakers since the nuclear revolution began. There is as yet no permanent solution to the problem of how to dispose of the high-level waste generated by commercial reactors, which constitutes the bulk of U.S. nuclear waste. One answer involves constructing underground disposal sites or using fracking technology to bore holes thousands of feet into the earth, where waste can be safely isolated for millennia. Several European countries and Canada have begun building subterranean disposal sites. But delays, funding cuts, local opposition, and a lack of incentives for congressional support have hindered America’s attempts to do the same.
Waste is the most easily politicized aspect of the nuclear industry. After Barack Obama took office in 2009, his administration canceled the long-planned Yucca Mountain underground repository for reasons related more to Democratic Party politics than national common sense. Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid repeatedly blocked the inclusion of funding for the Yucca Mountain repository in budget bills, fearing the anti-nuclear bent of his constituents. In his first term as president, Donald Trump failed to find a resolution to the Yucca Mountain issue. Because voters hold an overwhelmingly negative view of nuclear waste, commentators have often remarked that nothing ever happens with nuclear waste during an election year.
Meanwhile, utilities have spent the last seven decades accumulating more than ninety thousand tons of spent fuel from commercial reactors in steel-lined concrete casks. Following passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in the early 1980s, the utilities signed contracts with DOE for used fuel collection and disposal services at a fixed fee, which was in turn passed on to utility ratepayers. The collected fees were transferred to the Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF), which currently has a balance of $49.5 billion. Then, in the 2000s, after the DOE failed to start fuel collection on schedule, utilities began filing lawsuits, some of which have settled. The Treasury Department has paid utilities damages ranging from $600 million to $1.2 billion annually, leaving taxpayers on the hook. Meanwhile, the DOE’s fee collection for the NWF was paused indefinitely. As America ramps up its nuclear energy production to meet the twin needs of AI data centers and industrial electrification, the current quagmire — a combination of DOE failures, costly legal action, and ongoing waste storage concerns — will rapidly become unsustainable for utilities, government agencies, and taxpayers.
In the years ahead, ordinary Americans will continue to be hit the hardest. The AI boom is generating a wave of concern over rising electricity prices. With demand for new interconnections soaring and utilities investing in infrastructure upgrades, ratepayers could bear the brunt of the costs associated with a modernized grid. Expanded nuclear infrastructure and waste storage needed to accommodate additional nuclear energy production will only add to these costs, which ratepayers will see reflected in their utility bills. As inflation continues to eat into Americans’ budgets, policymakers will be on the lookout for ways to reduce the burden of rising electricity prices on households. By addressing the problem of high-level nuclear waste disposal head-on, nuclear recycling offers a path to alleviating some of these economic stresses.
On the export front, building domestic recycling capacity would enable American nuclear companies to reach economies of scale more quickly and compete with the end-to-end fuel cycle offering of Russian rivals. In keeping with Moscow’s attempts to construct an energy sphere of influence, the state-owned nuclear conglomerate Rosatom offers its clients (usually the governments of developing countries) a full package that includes financing, regulator formation, technical support, labor, and fuel. Crucially, Rosatom also offers take-back agreements to ship spent fuel rods to Russia for reprocessing. Those agreements play a key role in the “one-stop” approach that allows Russia to lock developing countries into its nuclear industrial base.
For now, U.S. nuclear developers such as Westinghouse cannot offer similar deals, making Rosatom a superior choice for energy-insecure states. By lowering regulatory barriers and streamlining international coordination, recent legislation like the ADVANCE Act of 2024 and the International Nuclear Energy Act (included in the 2026 NDAA) smooths the way for export competitiveness. But absent proven technology and operational knowhow at home, U.S. developers will struggle to establish credibility with potential foreign clients. The domestic deployment of recycling across the nuclear fuel supply chain is thus one critical step toward making America a competitive nuclear exporter and, by extension, strengthening its global geopolitical influence.
The future of AI, advanced manufacturing, and industrial electrification is currently riding on the rapid construction of several dozen new nuclear reactors. This is a risky approach. Reactors alone are not the solution to America’s energy woes. Building a new one can require years of siting and planning before construction begins. And with new data centers increasingly funded by private credit, financial risks from overindebted data center projects could easily spill over to the nuclear industry that has staked its revival on the takeoff of an AI economy.
Energy demand from AI is also impossible to predict. Many forecasts ignore the uncertainty around the balance between electricity demand for training and inference, as well as future gains in energy efficiency from next-generation semiconductors. Unexpectedly low power demand could leave nuclear creditors in the lurch. Recycling would provide a secondary rationale and a financial backbone for investments in nuclear power. Stored nuclear waste could be remade into usable fuel at American recycling facilities and then used in the domestic reactor fleet or shipped abroad to states seeking to pivot from Russian uranium suppliers. With uranium demand expected to surge nearly 30 percent by 2030, recycling would prime U.S. nuclear exporters for market dominance by opening federal waste stockpiles for sale abroad as fuel recycled in America.
By lowering financial and logistical barriers to obtaining fuel for a test reactor, recycling would also provide a needed boost to the cohort of American start-ups planning to construct smaller reactors with longer lifespans. Making these designs operational depends on the availability of HALEU (High Assay Low Enriched Uranium). Currently, there is no commercial-scale HALEU production anywhere globally aside from a scattering of small-scale production trials in Ohio, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Recycling products could help meet small-batch demand for the highly specialized fuels that start-ups need to test and run their first reactors, leveling the innovation playing field and freeing these companies to focus on disruption rather than lobbying.
Technologies with the potential to address a challenge for both the public and private sectors are exceedingly rare. Rarer still are technologies that can do this and yet are not years away from commercial viability. Closing the loop in the American nuclear fuel cycle will unlock a vast supply of American energy, helping to power data centers, industrial electrification, and precision manufacturing. A nuclear recycling reboot will benefit not just the growing U.S. nuclear industry and the nation’s future industrial base, but also the country’s overall national security. The opportunity now before the American nuclear industry is enormous. The technology, economic incentives, and policy momentum are aligning to make cheap, clean, baseload power a reality. Recycling will help underwrite that nuclear renaissance, turning millions of gigawatt hours of waste into sustainable energy and fulfilling the original aim of America’s nuclear founding fathers to build an independent, sovereign fuel cycle.[xii]
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