The renaissance in attitudes toward nuclear power is bolstering Curio’s multifaceted business model … [+] of new methods to reprocess spent fuel and new reactor designs.

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Nuclear energy is enjoying a growing acceptance in the U.S. once again. But that improvement in public opinion still leaves a lot of open questions about everything from optimal reactor designs and technologies to what to do with nuclear waste. Curio Legacy Ventures, Inc., a nuclear energy startup headquartered in Washington, DC, has set out to resolve all those dilemmas.

Originally founded in September 2021 as Curio Solutions by brothers Rabbi Yechezkel Moskowitz and Yehudah Moskowitz as part of their deep-tech accelerator, Synergos Holding, Curio Legacy Ventures was formally established in March 2021 to cultivate a circular economy involving nuclear waste recycling, advanced reactor design and production of isotopes and nuclides for medicine. The company closed a $15 million seed round last April.

The whole nuclear enchilada

“Our company is going to have reactors, fuel and the waste disposition and commodity extraction, the whole enchilada,” Ed McGinnis, president and CEO of Curio since early 2022, told me in an interview. He had spent the prior 30 years at the U.S. Department of Energy working on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear energy.

The first element of that “whole enchilada” that Curio has developed involves reprocessing the nuclear waste that has been generated–and continues to be generated–in the nation’s existing reactors.

“Nuclear fuel fresh when it’s just run in a reactor in the U.S. typically runs for about five years,” explained McGinnis. “When you pull it out of a reactor, after running for about five years, you’ve only used about 4% of the energy value. There’s still enough energy value that has not been used–sitting around the country in our nation’s 90,000-metric-ton… used nuclear fuel to meet our U.S. electricity needs for the next 150 years. So number one, you’ve got an incredible amount of untapped nuclear fuel waiting to be extracted, separated and repurposed. Number two, during that five year period, not only do you have a very large amount of that energy value that has not been utilized, you also have a lot of highly valuable isotopes that are produced during that fissioning process… This is a classic case of one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

Ed McGinnis, Curio’s president and CEO

Image courtesy Curio LV

One of the big challenges with waste reprocessing that Curio tackles is the threat of contributing to nuclear weapons proliferation. “President Carter… put a moratorium in place over the security concerns with the process being used at that time to reprocess, which is called PUREX,” McGinnis said. “It’s called PUREX for a reason, because it pulls out a pure stream of plutonium, and that plutonium-239 is weapons-usable.”

Another challenge is environmental. “That PUREX process is a nitric acid process. They take the fuel assemblies, chop it up, and then they put it in a bath of nitric acid to dissolve it and get to the remaining valuable products that they pull out.”

Tackling the reprocessing challenges

Curio’s NuCycle process tackles both problems. “We’ve come up with a recycling design of tech that’s fully patented that eliminates the use of nitric acid, so it’s environmentally much more friendly… it’s a superheated pyro process and electrolysis process, and with that process, we’re only going to have about three to four percent of the original high-level waste left… So number one, we take care of the environmental negative factor… Number two, we get rid of that Trojan horse security problem by never pulling out a pure stream of plutonium. We still are going to pull out the plutonium because it’s a better, higher intensity of energy fuel and lower weight ratio than uranium.”

The company’s resulting TRUfuel product is designed to be self-protecting from any proliferation risk. By infusing it with lanthanides and other fission products that make diversion detectable, the company delivers a radioactive profile that creates a naturally hardened proliferation barrier.

Curio’s approach to waste fuel recycling was supported by Per Peterson, distinguished professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared his thoughts with me in both emails and an interview. “Curio is distinguished by their approach of using fluorination for reprocessing of spent fuel from existing light water reactors,” he said. “This means that they recover reprocessed uranium in the form of UF6, which can go directly to re-enrichment. Because this is a pyrochemical process, the plutonium is recovered as a metal mixed with dilutants (uranium or other elements like zirconium). Thus the ideal fuel products for the plutonium recovered in this process are metal fuels. Curio has a partnership with Orano to re-enrich the recovered uranium to produce new fuel. For metallic fuels, Lightbridge has been developing a metallic fuel that can be used in existing commercial LWRs [light water reactors].”

That means that Curio’s NuCycle process, once it’s scaled up, can provide fuel to existing commercial nuclear reactors. But the other half of the company’s strategy is to design and build its own reactors as well.

Advanced reactor designs

“We have designed two advanced reactors, a small modular reactor and a micro reactor that is designed to be to run off of that plutonium fuel,” McGinnis explained. “Our reactor is going to be a third the size of a uranium-based reactor because of the density of power and a lower weight ratio, among other things.”

The path forward for Curio is to commercialize its NuCycle waste fuel recycling process while completing the development and commercialization of its reactor designs.

“Our business plan is by the early 2030s we are going to have all the entire loaf of bread,” McGinnis said. “So reactors, fuel supply, we’ll provide, and then we’ll provide the disposition pathway. And at the same time, we’re going to be extracting and mining that material for isotope sales. So that is a business like no one else has in the U.S., and that’s why we’re excited about it.”

The disposition pathway of the much-reduced nuclear waste involves deep burial in boreholes. “These startup companies have MOU’s with Deep Isolation, which has been developing a Universal Canister System technology for deep borehole disposal of high-level wastes from advanced fuel cycles, with support from ARPA-E,” said Peterson. “UC Berkeley has been actively engaged in this research.”

“If we don’t recycle, we’re also passing this buck–this unnecessary and imminently resolvable nuclear waste issue–on to not only our kids and grandkids, but to civilization as we know it for 10,000 years,” McGinnis concluded. “We can do this in a private-led way and do it in a way where we’re providing isotopes to fight cancer, to explore space, for industrial and other defense reasons. The message is we cannot afford to continue in our energy sectors where we’re not maximizing the use of finite resources, and we need to do it in a sustainable, secure, safe way.”