kiwichick wrote:tanada; re recycling nuclear fuel
why isn't that being done now?
or is it?
Europe is doing it, to a limited degree of partitioning, Japan is planning to do it (and actually building the facilities) to a much greater degree of partitioning. Russia does it, China and South Korea both have plans to do it but I am not sure if either of those are going forward.
The USA used to do it and a large recycling plant was built in South Carolina in the mid 1970's but President Carter believed if the USA stopped reprocessing then all the other western nations would as well, and he believes that reprocessing is a weapons proliferation risk. President Carter ordered his Administration to not issue the operating permit for the plant in South Carolina and as a result the builders lost the value of their investment expense of building the facility. As a foreign policy initiative it was a complete failure, nobody else with Nuclear power followed our lead in halting reprocessing.
Four years later President Reagen lifted the ban on Reprocessing but by then no investors were willing to risk building a plant when a change of President could cause their license to be revoked, so no commercial reprocessing plants have been built in the USA since the early 1970's.
Partitioning in this context means separating all of the chemicals that arise in the Spent Fuel, some of those like Silver are easily salable as are the three rare platinum group metals Ruthenium, Rhenium and Palladium. The Japanese are hoping that sales of those four metals will offset the cost of reprocessing, if they do then the reprocessed Uranium and Plutonium will be essentially free fuel for their power reactors in the future.