An advocate for developing nuclear energy in his home state, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has proposed a bill to advance nuclear fuel recycling, including research over its feasibility and safety.
The Advancing Research in Nuclear Fuel Recycling Act of 2025, cosponsored with Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, would require the U.S. Department of Energy to analyze the costs, benefits, and risks of recycling spent nuclear fuel compared to interim storage solutions.
“Spent nuclear fuel has the potential to dramatically increase America’s energy, economic, and national security,” Cruz said. “Domestic recycling can reduce the space we need for spent nuclear fuel, enhance energy independence, reduce our dependence on imports, and broaden the supply of rare elements and isotopes used in medicine and advanced technologies.
“Recycling solutions will also reduce the burden on individual states from nuclear waste accumulation, and accelerate progress on nuclear energy, which is our nation’s cleanest baseload energy source. I’m proud to work with Sen. Heinrich on this legislation and I urge my colleagues in the Senate to pass this bill.”
The bill would direct the DOE to analyze the “practicability, potential benefits, costs, and risks, including proliferation, of using dedicated recycling facilities to convert spent nuclear fuel, including spent high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel, into useable nuclear fuels, such as those for commercial light water reactors; advanced nuclear reactors; and medical, space-based, advanced-battery, and other non-reactor applications,” according to the bill language. Recycling would involve taking spent fuel already being held in storage sites nationwide to use as fuel or input for advanced nuclear reactors, existing reactors, or commercial applications, according to the bill language.
The bill also would direct the DOE to investigate the risks of aqueous (PUREX and its derivatives) recycling processes with the practicability, potential benefits, costs, and risk of non-aqueous (such as pyro-electrochemistry) recycling processes.
Hellbound and Down 