There’s plenty of unreclaimed fuel in the radioactive waste that’s been buried in Nevada and elsewhere. That’s what I’ve been heard anyway.
None of the spent fuel rods went to Nevada, thanks to Harry Reed. All of the spent fuel is at the plants.
This is very true.
Laws passed during the Carter Admin makes extracting U235 from spent fuel illegal.
There is not a single gram of spent fuel buried in Nevada. There never should be either. Yucca Mountain is porous tuff ABOVE the water table with documented flows through the repository levels down into the lower strata. Not just no but HELL NO. As a hydrogeo I will fight to my last breath that location. I am 100% pro nuke, and also a hard core supporter of reprocessing and fast spectrum reactors.
Spent fuel should be reprocessed the fission products should be mixed with borosilica glass which is impervious to water and then cases in copper cans then stainless steel outer can. From there you either drill into geologically stable granite like Central Texas’s 1.2 billion year stable granite, or mine into salt layers such as the 250+ million year stable Permian salt beds in the Panhandle or drill vertical then horizontal into stable Permian shales also 250-299MY old and put those cans in the bottom. Done, bentonite cement them in and sleep the sleep of the righteous. Any of these three strata are impervious to fluid flows, geologically stable and below any water table. Fission products need 500 years at most to decay to under natural uranium levels from that point it’s lower than background radiation levels end of story.
Spent fuel is a political problem not a technical one. Yucca is a boondoggle of epic proportions and only purpose was to line the pockets of Congress critter donor’s and buddies nothing more.