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by fc417fc802 21 days ago
Whether or not waste is reprocessed there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of. It's merely a matter of volume produced per unit of energy. Either approach is entirely reasonable.

The inability of the US to formally approve a permanent disposal site is purely political. Still, at this point enough other countries have managed to do so that we might eventually be able to pay to export our waste to one of them instead of solving our own dysfunction.
1 comments
chickenbig 20 days ago
> there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of

Fortunately it is self disposing, decaying away. Unlikely plain old mercury or arsenic.

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zer00eyz 20 days ago
The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay.

The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel (other than usable uranium) are plutonium, Strontium, cesium ... the rest of the material left over (4%) gets embedded in glass and dumped in a deep pit and forgotten about.

The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:

https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-dr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_...

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chickenbig 20 days ago
> The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay.

Well, there are many definitions, for instance https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/information-hub/factsheets/wh... is from the UK.

> The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel

You generally extract the trans-uranics from fission products. The former needs more specific treatment to deal with their longer half lives (or turning into MOX, which ends up more expensive than using normal uranium). The latter get vitrified (who needs the Sr or Cs, really).

> The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:

The Pu-238 for the RTG is generally produced in trace quantities in reactors, with reactor grade plutonium containing mostly Pu-239 and Pu-240.

I'm not a huge fan of these tiny RTG sources either. Spacecraft yes, otherwise ... proven to be somewhat dangerous when they become orphaned.

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