The US Department of Energy awarded $19.3 million to five companies "to advance recycling of used nuclear fuel." The announcement contains the following list of companies and the technologies they plan to develop:

• Alpha Nur Inc. will research and validate a process that will recover highly enriched uranium (HEU) from used nuclear fuel produced by U.S. based research reactors and transform it to a usable high assay low enrichment uranium (HALEU) form for reuse in small modular reactor designs.
• Curio Solutions, LLC will develop a process designed to produce uranium hexafluoride gas from used fuel.
• Flibe Energy Inc. will study the use of electrochemical methods to process used nuclear fuel.
• Oklo Inc. will study heavy element deposition in molten salt to optimize a pyro-processing plant design.
• Shine Technologies, LLC will develop a process design that incorporates transport, storage, and disposal together with hydro-processing of used fuel.

These awards follow the policies set out in a May 2025 executive order and the efforts of the Biden administration to support reprocessing in the United States (which included a $10 million funding opportunity for research announced by the DoE in December 2024). The current projects are expected to last up to three years.