Feds Want Nuclear Waste Train, But Don't Know Where It Would Go

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday August 31, 2014 @07:20AM from the put-that-anywhere dept.

mdsolar writes with news of a plan to move radioactive waste from nuclear plants. The U.S. government is looking for trains to haul radioactive waste from nuclear power plants to disposal sites. Too bad those trains have nowhere to go. Putting the cart before the horse, the U.S. Department of Energy recently asked companies for ideas on how the government should get the rail cars needed to haul 150-ton casks filled with used, radioactive nuclear fuel. They won't be moving anytime soon. The latest government plans call for having an interim test storage site in 2021 and a long-term geologic depository in 2048. No one knows where those sites will be, but the Obama administration is already thinking about contracts to develop, test and certify the necessary rail equipment.

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Re:Reprocessing? by Rising+Ape · 2014-08-31 08:23 · Score: 3, Informative

You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.
Reprocessing's been done, but it's quite messy and there's no demand for the recovered fuel. Making MOX is much more difficult and expensive than making standard uranium fuel. It's cheaper, easier and probably safer to just store the spent fuel in dry casks until a suitable disposal site is found. Fortunately, those casks last a long time.