It's Not Actually Waste: How CURIO is Tackling the Nuclear Waste Problem with Ed McGinnis

Imagine filling up your car at a gas station in Washington, DC, and heading toward Richmond. Twenty miles down the road, you pull over, call a tow truck, and scrap the car, with 96% of the fuel still in the tank. That's what we do with nuclear fuel in the United States right now.

Ed McGinnis is the CEO of Curio and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy. He's spent decades in nuclear policy and energy security, and he's now building something that could change how we think about nuclear waste entirely. Spoiler: he doesn't even call it waste. He calls it "slightly used fuel."

In this episode, Ed breaks down why the U.S. stopped recycling nuclear fuel in the 1970s, what went wrong with the Cold War-era Purex process, and how Curio's NuCycle technology does it differently ... without ever separating pure plutonium. We get into the $50 billion Nuclear Waste Fund that was collected from ratepayers and spent on other things, why the DOE is now paying over a billion dollars a year in court-ordered damages, and how 90,000+ metric tons of used fuel sitting at reactor sites across the country is actually the largest above-ground energy reserve in the world.

Plus: Curio's planned recycling facility, bigger than a football stadium, processing more fuel than every other recycling facility on the planet combined, and the 3,000+ trades-based jobs it would create at around $125K a year for 60+ years.

Topics covered:

• Why only 3-4% of nuclear fuel is actually used — and 96% is still usable energy
• The difference between the Cold War Purex process and Curio's NuCycle technology
• President Carter's ban on fuel recycling and the $13+ billion in lost investments
• How recycling reduces radiotoxicity from 100,000+ years to about 300 years
• Curio's partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 2019
• The Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the $50 billion fund, and the billion-dollar-a-year lawsuit payouts
• Russia still providing 20%+ of U.S. nuclear fuel — and what that means for energy security
• Curio's planned facility: 4,000 metric tons per year, 3,000+ jobs, mostly trades
• Curio's own SMR and micro-reactor designs (TrueFuel)

Resources:

Learn more about CURIO: curio.energy

Jimmy Carter's Ruling on Reprocessing Spent Nuclear Fuel: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1209/ML120960615.pdf