Spent fuel can be repossessed into weapons grade material and into commercial fuel. Europe, Russia and Japan all reprocessed spent fuel into commercial fuel.
Sort of. These reactors produce too much of the wrong isotopes of plutonium to make a good bomb. It’ll turn out to have about 100th the yield or so.
But that assumes we’d ever want to give out spent fuel to Europe, Russia, Japan for them to process it for that purpose anyway? And if we did why wouldn’t we just outright give them the pure stuff that we made specifically for the purpose.
Reprocessing into fuel for power plants is the only option that could make sense. But my understanding is reprocessing hasn’t ever proved to be economically worthwhile (I may be wrong on that though).
Burying this stuff is the best option unless someone can come up with a reactor design that burns up used fuel without reprocessing. (Wasn’t that company Gates backed proposing to do that?)
But that assumes we’d ever want to give out spent fuel to Europe, Russia, Japan for them to process it for that purpose anyway? And if we did why wouldn’t we just outright give them the pure stuff that we made specifically for the purpose.
Reprocessing into fuel for power plants is the only option that could make sense. But my understanding is reprocessing hasn’t ever proved to be economically worthwhile (I may be wrong on that though).
Burying this stuff is the best option unless someone can come up with a reactor design that burns up used fuel without reprocessing. (Wasn’t that company Gates backed proposing to do that?)