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Bush Administration to Support Nuclear Recycling

Posted by Zonk on from the with-this-and-plastic-we'll-be-set dept.

Ironsides writes "The Washington Post is reporting the the Bush Administration is planning to re-enrich spent nuclear fuel so that it can once again be used in nuclear reactors. Included in the plan is a proposal to take spent fuel from other countries and re-enrich it for use as well as domestic spent fuel. This would be a break with a policy set forth by President Carter in an attempt to discourage nuclear proliferation. Currently $250 Million as been proposed for FY 2007 to start developing the technology."

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  1. SciAm Article: Smarter Use for Nuclear Waste by johndeerejedi · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was a good Scientific American article in December 2005 about using fast reactors to use waste fuel from other reactors to produce power using pyrometalurgical techniques to process the fuel. I'm sorry but all Scientific American has is a preview of the article, entitled http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D556 0-D9B2-137C-99B283414B7F0000&ref=sciam&chanID=sa00 6 "Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste". The gist of the article is that current thermal reactors use only 5% of the enriched nuclear fuel (U235) and the waste includes a lot of Plutonium, U238, and other actinydes that the process in the article would consume. This pyrometalurgical processing also prevents taking out the Plutonium--it takes out the waste products, like Strontium. Since it can consume U238, Thorium, etc. it would be able to "burn" something like 95% of the nuclear fuel and the waste products would be short lived radioactive waste. I hope this is the procedure they are using, and not breeder reactors or conventional reprocessing.