Why recycling is the hottest trend in nuclear waste management

Posted: November 18, 2025

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, one question has proved persistent: What to do with all that radioactive waste? From the 1950s, when the first nuclear power stations went online, to 2016, nuclear reactors produced about 400,000 metric tons of atomic waste. The U.S. alone adds around 2,000 tons more each year. 

Now, nuclear power is seeing a global renaissance, driven by a combination of climate goals, growing energy demand and new technologies. China is building new reactors at a record pace, and even Western countries, where projects have been plagued by surging costs and delays, are looking to turn a corner. The U.S. plans to quadruple nuclear capacity by 2050, and dozens of startups there and elsewhere are working on advanced reactor designs, in part to power AI data centers. 

If it all comes to pass, this capacity surge could create soaring demand for solutions to deal with nuclear waste—especially as some research suggests new designs could produce more waste than traditional reactors.

Burying nuclear waste deep underground 

One solution, long dreamed about, is to simply bury all of our nuclear waste far out of sight. 

Finland is about to complete the world’s first large-scale, long-term underground storage facility. There, fuel rods will eventually be placed in cast-iron and copper canisters, then wrapped in water-absorbing clay and sealed in concrete—all buried in a tunnel some 1,500 feet below the surface. Once the facility is at capacity and sealed off, the canisters are meant to lie there for at least 100,000 years. 

Several other countries would like to follow suit and eventually build their own geological disposal facilities, including France, Sweden, Canada and the U.S. As it stands, most spent fuel is still sitting in storage ponds or concrete-and-steel containers at power plants or central repositories. The largest single storage site is Sellafield, in the U.K., where the world’s first commercial nuclear station opened in 1956. The government recently decided it wants the 140 tons of radioactive plutonium stored there to be deposited underground, too. 

Commercial efforts to deal with smaller quantities of nuclear waste are also taking shape, and could eventually scale up. In September, U.S. startup Deep Isolation announced that it signed a deal with Navarro Research and Engineering, a large federal contractor, to license its nuclear waste storage technology for use at Navarro’s private research labs. 

For Deep Isolation, the name is the game: The company wants to drill hundreds of meters underground to store nuclear waste in boreholes, where it says its patented canisters can contain the material with less radiation than a chest X-ray. 

How startups plan to recycle nuclear fuel in the U.S. 

Some companies are instead trying to kill two birds with one stone—by recycling nuclear waste to satisfy the growing demand for more fuel. After all, the International Energy Agency now estimates that nuclear capacity could grow more than 50% by the middle of this century. 

Spent fuel still contains significant amounts of untapped energy. A third of the 400,000 tons of nuclear waste produced since the 1950s has actually been reprocessed to recycle the uranium and plutonium it contains. A few countries—France, Russia, Japan and India—still do this. But the process is costly and controversial. 

Critics specifically point to the risk of proliferation, since obtaining fuel is the most difficult part of making a nuclear weapon. More than two dozen nonproliferation experts and environmental advocates wrote to U.S. President Joe Biden last year to object to a proposed pilot reprocessing plant in the U.S., fearing it could legitimize the building of similar facilities in other countries. 

Proponents, on the other hand, argue that reprocessing and recycling spent fuel would shrink the volume of highly radioactive material that eventually needs to be buried underground or otherwise disposed of. It would also reduce the need to mine new uranium, boosting its availability—and energy security—for countries without deposits to begin with. 

“Having a renewed conversation around what reprocessing means and what are the potential benefits and challenges associated with it is a good thing,” Patrick White, a former research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a think tank, told Yale Environment 360 earlier this year. 

Several startups are now pursuing new recycling technologies in the U.S. California-based Oklo, which is backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, recently announced plans to build the country’s first nuclear recycling facility in Tennessee, which would produce fuel for the company’s own design of small modular reactors. The project still lacks regulatory approval, however, and would not begin producing until the 2030s at the earliest. 

Oklo’s method relies on pyroprocessing, which keeps plutonium mixed up with other heavy elements instead of isolating it—a technique specifically developed to reduce proliferation risk. Curio, a rival startup led by former nuclear energy official Ed McGinnis, uses a similar approach but says its technology also recovers other valuable materials such as rhodium, palladium, krypton, americium, cesium and strontium. 

On the fuel recovery side, McGinnis is bullish, too. As he told the TechFirst podcast this year: “We will pull out enough [uranium] to provide as much as a third of the entire United States nuclear uranium feedstock annually from one facility.” 

Beyond recycling: nuclear transmutation and fusion power 

Recycling isn’t the only solution to tackle nuclear waste. Some companies are instead looking to address the root of the problem: the radioactivity itself.  

Swiss startup Transmutex wants to use a method called nuclear transmutation, involving a particle accelerator coupled to a reactor, which would break down the nuclear material into lighter, more stable forms. The company says the resulting waste would be 80% reduced from conventional plants, and remain radioactive for less than 500 years, instead of hundreds of thousands. 

“If it can be demonstrated to work, you basically get the best of both worlds,” Jack Henderson, chair of the nuclear physics group at the U.K.’s Institute of Physics, told the Financial Times. “You are able to reduce the level of radioactivity produced by burning up some of the longer-lived isotopes produced in your reactor—and you get energy out at the same time.”  

Nagra, Switzerland’s nuclear waste management body, endorsed the technology this year after spending several months exploring Transmutex’s method, which the company says could be used on 99% of the world’s nuclear waste. 

Scientists are also looking at particle accelerators, but with an eye on nuclear fusion. Terence Tarnowsky, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has run computer simulations to show that an accelerator could supercharge atom-splitting reactions in spent nuclear fuel, dissolved in a molten lithium salt, so they ultimately produce tritium—a rare form of hydrogen that, along with deuterium, is the key fuel in the fusion reactors now in development. 

It is still unclear which, if any, of these many methods will eventually win out. But with renewed interest in nuclear power, the pressure to give its waste a second life will only grow.