Everyone would like to see something done about the world’s growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel. We at Flibe Energy have been working on this problem for many years, and recently were selected by the US Department of Energy for an award. At the heart of what we want to do is a salt that […]
In November of 1951, a small group of engineers gathered at a private astronomical observatory on the shore of Lake Angelus, in Oakland County, Michigan. They had spent the previous year visiting nearly every nuclear facility in America that they could get into with an Atomic Energy Commission clearance — Argonne, Hanford, Oak Ridge — […]
The American Nuclear Society — the professional organization of nuclear engineers and scientists in the United States — published Position Statement #47 in January 2026. It is titled “Management of Surplus U.S. Nuclear Material.” It calls out uranium-233 specifically. And it says, in the clearest possible professional language, that what DOE is doing to our […]
Twenty years ago today, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 22, 2006, I started this blog and wrote the first post. I was thirty-one years old. I was working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer on nuclear-power concepts for deep-space missions. I was in my third year of […]
A recent article at Decouple examined the CANDU reactor as a potential destination for reprocessed uranium (RepU) from LWR spent fuel. The concept is straightforward: CANDU reactors run on natural uranium, and the U-235 remaining in spent LWR fuel exceeds the natural uranium threshold, so RepU blended with depleted uranium to produce a natural uranium […]
I just returned from two days in Reno, Nevada, where the Army Research Office’s DEVCOM ARO had convened a workshop at the University of Nevada titled “Closing the Gap: Research Priorities for U.S. REE Supply Chain Resilience.” Researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, Colorado School of Mines, the University of Minnesota, and the National […]
There’s a genuinely exciting story coming out of Oak Ridge right now. Isotek Systems — the contractor operating at Building 3019 and Building 2026 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — has extracted more than 17 grams of thorium-229 (Th-229) from the uranium-233 (U-233) inventory stored there. That represents a 1,700% increase in the world’s supply […]
On March 17, 2026, the Alabama Senate adopted Senate Joint Resolution 89 by voice vote, and on March 31 it passed the full Legislature and was delivered to the Governor. SJR89 formally urges the Governor and relevant state agencies to recognize the value of spent nuclear fuel and take state actions toward its development. This […]
The Department of Energy has made several awards under their solicitation DE-FOA-0003364 and one of them was to Flibe Energy. The total funding was originally described as $10M but ended up being $19M in the final selection, divided among five awardees. DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy Awards $19 Million to Advance Recycling of Used Nuclear […]
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce met yesterday in a hearing entitled “American Energy Dominance: Dawn of the New Nuclear Era.” Several witnesses from the nuclear industry gave testimony and responded to questions. Representative Gary Palmer of the sixth Congression district of Alabama asked a question to Dr. John Wagner of Idaho National Laboratory […]