Focused on solving tomorrow’s fuel cycle challenges today.
American leadership in nuclear energy depends on our ability to securely and competitively manage the recycling of used nuclear fuel.
ORNL’s Fuel Cycle Chemical Technology Group (FCCT) focuses on innovations needed to overcome technological risks to nuclear fuel recycling with the aim of shepherding technologies to engineering scale.
Transforming science into scalable solutions
Transforming science into scalable solutions
The team specializes in fission product chemistry, advanced separations and flowsheet development, nuclear off-gas management, and irradiation science and UF₆ chemistry, driving research from concept to commercialization. Specific expertise includes:
- Nuclear Process Engineering: Developing processes and process models that enable effective decision making in the economics and technological advancements of fuel cycle technology.
- Protecting the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Utilizing nuclear safeguards principles to understand material tracking while developing processes that prevent mishandling of nuclear material
- Water‑Energy Nexus: The production of potable water requires reliable and clean energy sources. A focus on recycling used nuclear fuel, including the mining of valuable radioisotopes for medical and industrial applications, ensures nuclear power is a viable energy source.
State-of-the-art tools
The group works with radioactive materials instead of surrogates whenever possible and boasts access to unique research infrastructure. This enables the testing and validation of systems under true fuel cycle conditions, shortening the path from concept to commercial readiness. Advanced tools and infrastructure include:
- Iodine Off-Gas Testing and Abatement (IOTA) Lab: The only DOE facility dedicated to testing iodine sorbents in reprocessing conditions.
- Actinide Mass Spectrometry Laboratory: A suite of mass spectrometry instruments allowing the understanding of speciation, quantification of metal concentrations, and identification of gaseous species
- f-Element Spectroscopy Lab: Revealing the dynamic coordination of separations chemistry using UV-Vis-NIR, fluorescence, FTIR, and Raman spectroscopy.
- Uranium Science and Engineering Testbed: A 20-foot pulsed separation column with full solvent recovery system and a 12B UF₆ container to simulate facility-scale operations.
Partnering for national impact
Partnering for national impact
The group works across government, academia and industry to accelerate technology maturation and deployment, including key partnerships in:
- Advanced Chlorination: Scaling and de‑risking the advanced chlorination of zirconium and aluminum-based fuel cladding to enable reclassification to low-level waste or recycling, in partnership with Idaho National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.
- Advanced Voloxidation: Joint effort with Idaho National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory to derisk the nitrogen dioxide-mediated oxidation of used nuclear fuel for reprocessing.
- NuCycle Consortium: Demonstrating integrated decladding and oxidation workflows for fuel recycling alongside Curio, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory.
- Education Pipeline: FCCT is focused on building the next generation's workforce and hosts several undergraduate and graduate interns each year.
Scaling innovation for competitive advantage
By harnessing cutting-edge facilities, multidisciplinary expertise and strategic collaborations, the FCCT group is working to overcome the barriers that stand between promising lab-scale technologies and real-world implementation.