America’s growing electricity demand is bringing a practical question into focus: How do we build power supplies that businesses and communities can depend on for decades?
For a manufacturer building a new factory or a semiconductor company expanding production, reliability means having electricity available around the clock and confidence that the supply can support a long-term investment. Meeting that need requires planning for both the power plant and the fuel that will keep it running.
At Oklo, we are developing our reactors, fuel recycling technology, and fuel fabrication capabilities together. Our Aurora powerhouses are designed to use fresh or recycled fuel, giving us multiple pathways to supply the plants we intend to own and operate. Recycling would allow us to build part of that supply from a resource already here in the United States: used nuclear fuel.
The United States has accumulated nearly 100,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. Much of it is stored safely at nuclear power plant sites, awaiting a long-term management solution. That material still contains most of its original energy potential.
Today’s conventional reactors use only a small portion of the energy available in their fuel. Recycling recovers useful material from that used fuel and prepares it for another pass through a reactor. Fast-fission reactors can access energy that conventional reactors leave behind, while reducing the amount of material requiring long-term disposal.
The potential is substantial.
If fully utilized through fast-fission power plants, existing U.S. inventories could provide enough energy to power the country for more than 100 years at current consumption levels.
Recently, the Department of Energy has proposed a new way to address the nuclear fuel cycle – the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus initiative. It creates an opportunity to plan those capabilities together through voluntary federal-state partnerships. The program envisions bringing activities such as fuel fabrication, enrichment, recycling, and waste disposition onto shared campuses. A campus could connect used fuel recycling and new fuel production with advanced reactors serving factories, industrial facilities, and other electricity customers.
In addition to the enormous energy potential—current levels of used nuclear fuel contain the energy equivalent of 1.2 trillion barrels of oil— recycling used nuclear material also dramatically changes the waste challenge: reducing the waste-management timeframe from more than 100,000 years to less than 300 years.
For customers, the value of this approach is the connection between a long-term energy resource and the infrastructure needed to turn it into dependable electricity. For the U.S., it is an opportunity to strengthen domestic fuel supply while putting spent material to productive use.
Building reliable power requires sustained work across fuel supply, plant development, and operations. Innovation campuses could help bring that work together at commercial scale, with customers’ long-term needs built into the planning from the start.
