While miners search for fresh deposits, engineers are pulling uranium from the nation's nuclear attic. Located at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Department of Energy’s H Canyon facility stands as the only operational, radiologically shielded chemical separations plant in the United States. Built in the early 1950s, the massive reinforced-concrete structure originally processed spent fuel to produce weapons-grade materials during the Cold War.
Federal authorities have shifted H Canyon’s core assignment toward recycling and environmental remediation. The facility uses an advanced chemical extraction process to dissolve aluminum-clad spent nuclear fuel, aluminum-clad targets, and legacy research reactor cores in nitric acid. Operators run the acidic solution through liquid-liquid solvent extraction columns, stripping out uranium and separating radioactive fission products.
The recovered high-purity product is blended down with natural or depleted uranium to produce low-enriched material suitable for civilian energy. This domestic processing effort achieves two objectives at once: it permanently disposes of volatile legacy nuclear inventories while creating a direct domestic feedstock for commercial utility operators starved for raw supply.
