Natura joins Texas A&M team on $1M slice of ARPA-E nuclear fuel grant
What's the deal? Natura Resources has joined a Texas A&M-led team awarded $5.38 million by the US Department of EnergyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to study whether materials in spent nuclear fuel can be recycled into fuel for molten salt reactors. Natura's share of the three-year project is about $1 million. The grant came through ARPA-EDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s HORNIG program.
What's the endgame? The team — which includes the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment StationDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Savannah River National LaboratoryDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → — will test whether long-lived transuranic materials from spent fuel can be incorporated into thorium-based molten-salt fuel. The goal is to reduce the US spent-fuel stockpile while limiting new long-lived radionuclides.
Why now? The award is part of ARPA-E's up to $50 million investment across eight projects to advance next-generation nuclear fuels. It builds on more than $19 million the DOE provided earlier this year for spent-fuel recycling research.
Natura will serve as the technology commercialisation partner, handling data collection, validation, and documentation. Chief executive officer Jordan Robison framed it as part of a wider relationship, noting Texas A&M is a proposed site for Natura's MSR-100 reactor.
What could go wrong? The money funds research, not deployment. Officials cautioned the work is early; US deputy secretary of energy James P. Danly said it will "take years of research to figure out whether or not it works." France has recycled nuclear fuel for decades, but the US has not built out that capability.
The signal: The grant reflects a broad federal push to treat spent fuel as an asset rather than waste, with other HORNIG recipients including Oklo, Westinghouse, and Idaho National LaboratoryDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. For Natura, the roughly $1 million sits in the mid-range for deals of this size — modest money, but a foothold in a government effort to rebuild a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain.
Read more: prnewswire.com
Image credit: Naturaresources
