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

<p>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&#39;s what we do with nuclear fuel in the United States right now.</p><p><strong>Ed McGinnis</strong> is the CEO of <strong>Curio</strong> and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy. He&#39;s spent decades in nuclear policy and energy security, and he&#39;s now building something that could change how we think about nuclear waste entirely. Spoiler: he doesn&#39;t even call it waste. He calls it &quot;slightly used fuel.&quot;</p><p>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&#39;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.</p><p>Plus: Curio&#39;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.</p><p><strong>Topics covered:</strong><br></p><ul><li>Why only 3-4% of nuclear fuel is actually used — and 96% is still usable energy</li><li>The difference between the Cold War Purex process and Curio&#39;s NuCycle technology</li><li>President Carter&#39;s ban on fuel recycling and the $13+ billion in lost investments</li><li>How recycling reduces radiotoxicity from 100,000+ years to about 300 years</li><li>Curio&#39;s partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 2019</li><li>The Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the $50 billion fund, and the billion-dollar-a-year lawsuit payouts</li><li>Russia still providing 20%+ of U.S. nuclear fuel — and what that means for energy security</li><li>Curio&#39;s planned facility: 4,000 metric tons per year, 3,000+ jobs, mostly trades</li><li>Curio&#39;s own SMR and micro-reactor designs (TrueFuel)</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>Resources:</strong> </p><p>Learn more about <strong>CURIO</strong>: <a href="https://curio.energy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">curio.energy</a> </p><p><strong>Jimmy Carter&#39;s Ruling on Reprocessing Spent Nuclear Fuel: </strong><a href="https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1209/ML120960615.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1209/ML120960615.pdf </a></p><p><br></p>