[elisee]

The article says "The first, and easiest way to address it is to reprocess spent fuel as France does." but France has a long-term nuclear waste storage project (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o) so that seems to paint an incomplete picture?

I don't know much about the subject to be fair.

[PaulHoule]

Many countries have reprocessed waste, but only France has really closed the fuel cycle.

Doing that requires fabricating new fuel elements and with oxide fuels that means making ‘mixed oxide’ of plutonium and uranium oxides.

The established process for that involves grinding the two oxides in a ‘high energy ball mill’ which makes nano particles. The HEBM can turn a harmless material like silica into deadly (wreck your lungs) dust and just imagine what it can do with plutonium.

I think in France they have the workers wear respirators 100% of the time at the fuel fab, but in most countries that is not acceptable —- the dust is easy to detect so whatever real danger there is or isn’t people are going to worry about it. The factory that Karen Silkwood worked at had that problem, the U.S. recently failed to build a MOX plant, the U.K. built one that failed because the fuel was not homogenous enough to be usable.

There are other ways you can make fuel, so as coprecipitation, metal fuel, molten salt fuel, but for most of the world it is not a solved problem.

[fuoqi]

>only France has really closed the fuel cycle

No. Fuel reprocessing close to the France's technological level is also performed routinely in Russia and Japan. And "closed fuel cycle" usually means using uranium-238 for energy generation at the level of not needing to mine new uranium and instead being able to use existing dumps of depleted uranium.

The closest country to properly closing fuel cycle is Russia with its BN [0] and BREST [1] reactors. But the biggest problem is economic feasibility. Cost of uranium is relatively low and ocean extraction puts relatively low cap on it. Unfortunately the ability to "burn" waste has low economic appeal in the economic system which hardly can think several decades ahead.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)

[jhgb]

> Fuel reprocessing close to the France's technological level is also performed routinely in Russia and Japan.

...at a rate much smaller than what France is doing. Maybe that's what was meant by GP's statement? (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... -- also notice that this page claims that Japan is yet to start its reprocessing plant, so according to that, it's not being "performed routinely in Japan" just yet.)

[fuoqi]

>at a rate much smaller than what France is doing

No wonders since La Hague handles waste from a bigger number of reactors. In France only they have 58 reactors vs 39 in Russia and they also handle waste from other countries as well. Considering this factor, the capacities (1700 vs 400) look comparable.

>notice that this page claims that Japan is yet to start its reprocessing plant, so according to that, it's not being "performed routinely in Japan" just yet

It's weird that your link does not mention the Tokai plant which works since 80s.

[jhgb]

> No wonders since it handles waste from a bigger number of reactors. In France only they have 58 reactors vs 39 in Russia and they also handle waste from other countries as well.

Which might mean that they don't reprocess all of Russian waste, unlike the French facility processing French waste? Not sure about the exact current numbers, though.

> It's weird that your link does not mention the Tokai plant which works since 80s.

The link mentions the plant. It also implies that plant doesn't operate anymore today, having ceased commercial operations in 2006. (See also https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Tokai-reprocessing-pla...: "The plant [...] has stood idle since 2006 when a contract for reprocessing used fuel from commercial power reactors came to an end")

[fuoqi]

>Which might mean that they don't reprocess all of Russian waste, unlike the French facility processing French waste

I don't know if France indeed processes all its waste, but in the Russian case it certainly not the case today. This is why Russia builds the RT-2 plant in Zheleznogorsk with 800 t/y capacity specialized for processing VVER waste (Russia has several reactor designs in operation, including RBMK, which complicates full reprocessing).

[namdnay]

Long term storage represents less than 1% of total waste, the rest is reprocessed. I can’t remember the exact figure, but the “dangerous” waste for the whole of France is something like 10 tons a year - not a big logistical issue

[PaulHoule]

Reprocessing contaminates air and water to some extent. The most difficult product to control is Kr 85 which is an inert gas that usually gets vented to the air but could be stored cryogenically.

Waste products include Cs 137 and some other fission products that decay in 500 years or so. If these are concentrated they generate heat that must be managed. You also get some isotopes of uranium that are not good for fission like U 236, the plutonium goes back into reactors and so can some other transuranics, but others pose challenges. Np 237 is probably the isotope that would be most desirable to steal from a reprocessing plant to make a gun-type bomb, put it back into the reactor and it will fission but also breed Pu 238 which will make huge amounts of decay heat. This complicates the handling of the fuel but it might be a good thing because there is no way anybody is making a bomb out of Pu that is so contaminated…

[Aerroon]

To put the number into context: a 1 cubic meter block of uranium weighs 19 tons.

You could probably fit that under a king size bed. The bed would need about 25 cm of clearance from the floor though (203x193x25 cm ~ 1 cubic meter).

[tomtimtall]

I love the comparison! :D It conjures the image of someone answering concerns about storage with “don’t worry we can just hide it under my bed!”

[DennisP]

Reprocessing just reduces the amount of waste. As far as I know, France is not doing the next step, "use modern reactor designs that actually clean up old fuel from light water reactors."

Conventional nuclear reactors are limited in "burnup," the amount of fissile fuel they manage to fission before neutron poisons shut down the reaction. Reprocessing removes the neutron poisons so you can fission more of the fuel. (Some of the waste products of fission are neutron poisons, meaning they soak up neutrons so they can't trigger fission reactions.)

Even after reprocessing, the bulk of the long-term radioactivity comes from plutonium and other transuranics (elements heavier than uranium). Those are made when uranium (or heavier) atoms absorb neutrons without fissioning. Reprocessing doesn't help remove those, but advanced reactors can fission those just fine. They can also fission U238, which is the bulk of nuclear waste (though not really radioactive by itself).

What's left after all that is just the fission products, which is about 1% of conventional reactor waste. Encase them in glass, bury them, and they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in about 300 years.

[boudin]

I'm a bit surprised by this as well because currently, the only practical way to deal with nuclear waste is to burry it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Undergroun...