Project Overview
RecyCal PDSAR Preliminary Safety Design and Analysis Report | NE 167, UC Berkeley
California has nearly 3,500 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sitting in interim storage at coastal reactor sites — and no clear plan for what happens next. RecyCal was our team’s answer to that problem: a hypothetical co-located facility in California’s Central Valley designed to reprocess spent fuel using pyrochemical fluoride volatility methods, enrich recovered uranium to High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU+) for advanced reactors, and permanently dispose of the resulting high-level waste in deep horizontal boreholes. The project was developed as a capstone-level exercise in regulatory licensing, requiring us to navigate the full complexity of a first-of-kind nuclear facility under 10 CFR Part 50.
My primary role was leading the team’s regulatory strategy. I took the lead on drafting responses to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Requests for Additional Information — the formal back-and-forth process that defines whether a facility is licensable. That meant working through site layout and workforce estimates, environmental impact comparisons against alternative disposal strategies, detailed material-at-risk inventories for the Curio pyrochemical reprocessing flow, Universal Canister System and borehole design parameters, and spent fuel transportation logistics from California’s four Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations. I was also responsible for threading regulatory compliance across the document — ensuring that our safety analysis, operational scenarios, and accident analysis all mapped coherently onto 10 CFR Parts 50, 70, 72, and 190.
What made this project genuinely difficult, and genuinely interesting, was that the regulatory framework for what we were proposing barely exists. Borehole disposal was not contemplated when the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was written. Reprocessing to HALEU hadn’t been done domestically for civilian purposes. We had to reason carefully about where existing regulations applied, where they didn’t, and what that meant for a real licensing narrative. That tension — between technical ambition and regulatory reality — is exactly the kind of problem I want to keep working on.
Dani Solakian 