en.Wedoany.com Reported - Nuclear energy company Curio has received $2.5 million in new funding from the US Department of Energy (DOE) to test key components of its NuCycle nuclear fuel recycling process using actual spent nuclear fuel and transuranic elements.
The funding comes from the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and will be combined with approximately $1 million from Curio for laboratory-scale testing of two operations—selective fluoride volatility and electrowinning. These two operations are central to the NuCycle process, which aims to treat spent nuclear fuel as a recoverable resource rather than merely as waste for disposal.
The testing will take place at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). The PNNL team will test the fluorination process, which separates uranium from other radioactive materials; the SRNL team will develop electrowinning equipment to extract transuranic elements from molten salts using high temperatures and electricity.
Curio's NuCycle process is designed to recover materials from spent nuclear fuel that still hold energy value. The company plans to build a laboratory and demonstration facility capable of processing up to 4,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. This funding builds on a $5 million ARPA-E cost-share project initiated in 2023, which conducted side-by-side laboratory demonstrations of the complete NuCycle process at Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and PNNL, reaching a critical "go/no-go" milestone in September 2025 that provided data on chemical reactions and reaction rates.
Unlike previous efforts that used simulated materials, this round of funding will advance the technology into a testing phase using actual spent nuclear fuel and transuranic elements, providing the necessary data to assess the performance of each separation step under real-world conditions.
Curio CEO Ed McGinnis said the company is encouraged by the Trump administration's forward-looking actions supporting innovation in spent nuclear fuel recycling. He stated that this additional funding further demonstrates the DOE's intent to embrace new technologies to reduce the amount of nuclear waste in storage and tap into untapped resources currently sitting idle in domestic reserves, even beyond the fuel cycle.
Beyond laboratory testing, Curio will also conduct preliminary engineering design for the fluorination and electrowinning equipment and study regulatory requirements, including regulatory engagement plans, white papers addressing regulatory issues, and potential exemption analyses. The company aims to achieve deployment by the end of 2027, has already applied for a Part 70 operating license, and has signed agreements or memoranda of understanding with nuclear industry firms such as NuScale, Framatome, and Sargent & Lundy.
This technology is part of a series of initiatives to extract more value from the growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel. If the process can be validated at a larger scale, recycling could reduce the amount of material requiring long-term storage while recovering uranium and transuranic elements for further use. The NuCycle project is funded by ARPA-E, which supports high-risk energy technologies with potential strategic and commercial impact.
