Maybe this is what is spooking the Uranium market?
The link below was posted by Il Duce
And
maybe some entities are starting to realise it's impact on the Uranium market?
https://donalds.house.gov/uploadedfiles/nuclear_waste_reprocessing_act.pdf
CONVERTING UNF RADIOISOTOPES INTO ENERGY (CURIE)
Department of Energy (.gov)
https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov › FileContent
PDF
7 June 2022 — agree to the following
U.S. Competitiveness Provision as
part of an award under this FOA.
U.S. Competitiveness. The Contractor (Prime ...
AR-311-03.19
ARPA-E funds technology with the potential to be disruptive in the marketplace. The mere
creation of a new learning curve does not ensure market penetration. Rather, the ultimate
value of a technology is determined by the marketplace, and impactful technologies ultimately
become disruptive – that is, they are widely adopted and displace existing technologies from
the marketplace or create entirely new markets. ARPA-E understands that definitive proof of
market disruption takes time, particularly for energy technologies.
Therefore, ARPA-E funds the
development of technologies that, if technically successful, have clear disruptive potential, e.g.,
by demonstrating capability for manufacturing at competitive cost and deployment at scale
AR-311-03.19
B. PROGRAM OVERVIEW
The program goal of CURIE is to enable commercially viable reprocessing of used nuclear fuel
(UNF)3 from the current light water reactor (LWR) fleet by resolving key gaps/barriers in
reprocessing technologies, process monitoring, and facility design. The actinides in LWR UNF
would ideally be
reprocessed into feedstock that would be used to fuel advanced nuclear
reactors (ARs), while other commercially valuable materials would be harvested for industrial
and
medical uses. Projects funded under CURIE will develop innovative separations
technologies, process monitoring techniques for special nuclear material (SNM4), and/or
equipment designs that will significantly improve the economics and process monitoring of
reprocessing technologies while dramatically reducing the volume of high-level waste (HLW)5
from LWR UNF requiring disposal (see Section I.C, “Program Objectives”
. Specifically, CURIE is
interested in separations technologies, process monitoring to enable predictive material
accountancy, innovative equipment designs, and systems analyses that satisfy one or more of
the global program metrics without negatively impacting other program metrics:
(1) significantly (i.e., at least an order of magnitude) reduce the volume of LWR HLW
requiring permanent disposal,
(2) maintain disposal costs in the range of 0.1¢/kilowatt-hour (kWh)6,
(3) provide a 1¢/kWh7 fuel cost for a 200 metric tons heavy metal (MTHM)/yr nth-of-a-kind
(NOAK) facility,
(4) enable in situ SNM process monitoring approaches that predict, within 1% uncertainty
and under representative conditions, the post-process material accountancy, and
(5) enable UNF separations that do not produce pure plutonium streams.
In aggregate, these metrics are envisioned to support a commercially viable reprocessing
technology that would provide valuable AR fuel feedstock and the ability to recover fission
products of interest (e.g., precious metals and medical radioisotopes) while minimizing the
Nation’s HLW waste impact. CURIE is part of a comprehensive, nearly $90 million ARPA-E
strategy to manage and reduce the Nation’s HLW waste inventory and is designed to
complement the ARPA-E ONWARDS8 program. While both the ONWARDS and CURIE programs
seek to enable innovations that will minimize HLW quantities, CURIE focuses on the
development of technologies that will enable UNF from the current LWR fleet
to be utilized as
feedstock for future nuclear fuel
(20min delay)