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Why Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Is Recycling in Name Only

October 14, 2026By: Ross Matzkin-Bridger

Reprocessing promises to recycle nuclear waste, but it fails on technology, cost, security, and waste management—and distracts from the nuclear technologies that actually work.

Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, often erroneously conflated with recycling, is the latest in a long list of technologies and products that have exploited human desire for silver-bullet solutions, but in reality deliver more problems than fixes. The formula is a familiar one: a charismatic salesman captures our attention with a product they market as a remedy for a persistent problem; the explanation for how the technology works is muddled or oversimplified; funders and other stakeholders are driven by their desire to believe; and the venture ends in disappointment, wasted money, and sometimes worse.

The future of nuclear energy is promising, but only if policymakers and industry make smart investment choices that focus on the technologies that work. Reprocessing is a distraction that takes attention away from sensible solutions.

There are four main reasons why spent fuel reprocessing is a bad idea and should be shelved in favor of the nuclear energy technologies that can actually deliver on their promises.

Why Reprocessing Doesn’t Work as Advertised

The goal of reprocessing is to “recycle” spent fuel, but the two are very different. Reprocessing is a technology that chops up spent nuclear fuel, dissolves it, then separates the resulting slurry into various streams of waste and potentially reusable material. The recycling of that potentially reusable material into new fuel is where the pitch falls short.

Understanding the technical process helps explain where the problems emerge. When fresh fuel goes into a nuclear power reactor, it is composed only of low-enriched uranium. After the nuclear reaction, spent fuel has a composition broadly binned into four types of elements: low-enriched uranium; plutonium; highly radioactive materials such as strontium and cesium that are collectively called fission products; and ultra-heavy metals like neptunium and americium, which are referred to as minor actinides. The uranium, plutonium, and minor actinides look like reusable assets if separated from the fission products, which are mostly waste.

However, the varying levels of radiotoxicity, decay heat, and volatility across spent fuel’s elements make it enormously complex to handle. Those potentially reusable materials are not as appealing in real life as they are on a PowerPoint slide. Plutonium and minor actinides are very difficult to manipulate and manufacture into fuel, and reprocessed uranium has contaminants that cannot be removed. In the end, these elements don’t make such good fuel after all. This is a large reason why, in the few countries that have attempted reprocessing, approximately 99 percent of all recovered material is never recycled.

France, often heralded as a gold standard for the technology, offers a prime example. Despite hosting the world’s most extensive reprocessing infrastructure, it actually recycles very little. Against a goal of recycling 96 percent of its spent fuel volume, the country’s recycling rate in practice is approximately 1 percent. The remaining 99 percent of material either goes to waste or is stored indefinitely.

Today, there are claims of “advanced recycling” technologies that purport to solve these problems. But these are just decades-old technologies that vendors have dusted off, rebranded, and marketed with flowery adjectives and no evidence of a working product. The two reprocessing technologies that vendors are marketing today—aqueous reprocessing and pyroprocessing—were developed in the 1940s and 1960s, respectively. The truth is that there have been no major technical breakthroughs in either of these approaches that address the core problems with reprocessing.

Why the Economics of Reprocessing Fail

The high costs of reprocessing and attempted recycling dwarf the more economical alternative of manufacturing fuel from abundant fresh uranium. Thorough studies have demonstrated the economic advantage of choosing fresh uranium over reprocessing—and that advantage bears out in real life. In the countries that have deployed commercial-scale reprocessing—France, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom—the industry has survived only with massive government subsidies. It simply cannot compete on its own.

The United States presents an excellent case in point. Industry attempted commercial reprocessing in West Valley, New York, in 1966. When it proved unprofitable, the plant’s operator closed up shop and left the community with a contaminated site and 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste in underground tanks.

After the Carter administration paused US reprocessing in the 1970s, former President Ronald Reagan came into office with a different idea. In 1981, President Reagan announced that reprocessing would be allowed to continue but had to compete in the free market—there would be no government handouts. The budding reprocessing industry dried up nearly overnight. This was the downfall for the United States’ most ambitious attempt, the Barnwell reprocessing plant, which was intended to receive spent fuel from a sizable share of the country’s commercial reactor fleet. But without government money, there was no business model. The owners abandoned the plant soon after Reagan’s announcement.

Today, the government’s commitment to avoiding subsidies is on shaky ground. The Trump administration is considering opening a pathway for electricity consumers to fund tens of billions of dollars for reprocessing efforts. This development proves the point: Reprocessing cannot compete in a free market filled with better and less costly options, forcing vendors to try tapping into taxpayer funds as a lifeline.

How Reprocessing Creates Nuclear Proliferation and Security Risks

All reprocessing technologies result in a purified form of plutonium that can be used to make nuclear weapons. Obtaining weapons-usable material is the most difficult part of making a nuclear bomb, which is why global nonproliferation and nuclear security efforts have put so much focus on restricting such materials and their means of production. The expansion of reprocessing would result in more weapons-usable materials in more civilian facilities at home and abroad.

Some claim that so-called “advanced recycling” technologies are proliferation resistant. This is a particularly common refrain from proponents of pyroprocessing, who assert that the technology neutralizes proliferation concerns by commingling plutonium with minor actinides like neptunium, americium, and curium. Yet experts from seven national laboratories examined this issue in two independent studies and found that the proliferation risk of plutonium commingled with minor actinides is very similar to pure plutonium. Further, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the US Department of Energy (DOE), and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) all classify plutonium commingled with minor actinides as material of the highest risk for weaponization, on par with pure plutonium and weapons-grade uranium. In other words, this material could be used to make a bomb.

The facts and science are clear. Reprocessing is a dangerous technology that increases security risks and flies in the face of nonproliferation best practices. Unsubstantiated claims of proliferation resistance from reprocessing advocates do not pass muster.

Why Reprocessing Makes Nuclear Waste Harder to Manage

Disposing of nuclear waste is a politically sensitive topic that requires open, honest engagement with communities. Advocates sometimes disingenuously present reprocessing and recycling as a way to sidestep the need for a long-term waste repository. The truth is that reprocessing not only produces waste but also makes waste management a more complex problem.

Reprocessing increases the overall volume of waste and the number of waste forms; it yields solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes that have unique management requirements. Reprocessing advocates correctly point out that it also concentrates hot, highly radioactive waste into a smaller volume. But that smaller volume does not ease disposal requirements, because the footprint needed for a repository is a function of heat load, not volume. Hot, radioactive packages require significant spacing.

France and the United Kingdom learned this lesson the hard way. Both countries have reprocessed for roughly six decades (the United Kingdom stopped in 2022) and now face greater waste management challenges than countries that have pursued the direct disposal of spent fuel, in which spent fuel is sealed in canisters and placed in a deep underground repository. Today, France and the United Kingdom are not only working on developing a deep geologic repository like other countries with nuclear power, but they also have the extra burden of managing the various, often messy, waste forms that reprocessing produces.

Direct disposal remains the easiest, safest, and most cost-effective waste management option for policymakers and industry.

What US Nuclear Policy Should Focus on Instead

Industry and scientists have had eight decades to advance reprocessing technology and come up with a model that enables fuel recycling, is cost-efficient, meets common-sense security standards, and minimizes waste. They have failed on all fronts, and there is no evidence of any meaningful breakthroughs on the horizon.

With a policy goal of quadrupling nuclear energy capacity by 2050, the United States needs to move now to deploy the technologies that can work, scale efficiently, and are safe. Thankfully, there are many strong options within the realm of proven reactor designs, a uranium fuel cycle, and direct disposal of spent fuel. This is the path to abundant, secure, and cost-effective electricity for consumers.

Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou has written extensively about the “fake it till you make it” ethos that has embedded itself into the culture of technology development. The philosophy may make sense for consumer electronics or software that can be patched and improved over time. But it is irresponsible when it comes to nuclear technologies that have much higher stakes—especially when proven technologies are ready to deploy. Reprocessing has had 80 years of faking it. It is time to move on.

About the Author: Ross Matzkin-Bridger

Ross Matzkin-Bridger serves as senior advisor for the Nuclear Scaling Initiative and senior director for the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Nuclear Materials Security Program. He served as a senior advisor at the US Department of Energy under both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

October 17, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | reprocessing