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by jki275 2634 days ago
There’s little need to store nuclear waste. Reprocess it and use the remaining fuel.
1 comments

This does nothing to the fission products. And reprocessing only lets you destroy the actinides if you burn them in a fast reactor. Fast reactors have, so far, been even more expensive than thermal reactors.
That's only because the US stopped all R&D on them under Carter.

Again, the only reason we're not all nuclear today is because of politics.

Fast reactors have been disappointing all over the world. The harder neutron spectrum is more damaging to materials, and liquid sodium has serious drawbacks. Fabrication of fuel elements with mixed actinides is also difficult. Fast reactors also require a higher density of fuel (due to the lower fission cross section at high neutron energy), which presents safety issues.
The French reprocess all their fuel as I understand it. We could do the same, we choose not to.

That's probably the wrong choice.

The french choice was clearly the wrong one. It's a net economic loss for them. It was predicated on the use of the separated Pu in fast reactors, but their experience with fast reactors was dismal.
It's not about whether it makes money.

It's a way to drastically reduce the waste from the process.