I never heard of that before. What does one do with recycled nuclear material from a power plant?
Let's see what I have handy...
There's a better way than burying it- other countries have, for decades, recycled the stuff:
US Nuclear Power Debate
... The Bush administration also wants to explore new technology to recycle nuclear
fuel, increasing its efficiency and possibly reducing its danger. ...
Other info:
Numatec - the Tri-Cities' 'French connection'
... Numatec other parent is Cogema, the owner and operator of facilities used to produce
and recycle nuclear fuel, including many designed and built by SGN. ...
Nuclear Electricity
... gas equivalent). • Uranium offers a long-term source of energy. Unlike
fossil fuels, we can recycle nuclear fuel. We can recover ...
[MMA Alumni] Helping out MMA Nuclear Employed Alumni
... Many MMA Grads are employed in the Nuclear Power industry, ever since President Carter
killed the national plans to recycle nuclear fuel as was always intended ...
[PDF] U. S. Nuclear Waste Policy: Reaching Critical Mass
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... An Aside: Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Overseas In addition to the United States,
only two other countries don't recycle nuclear fuel as a matter of national ...
Salon.com Technology | Nukes now!
... Other countries, such as Japan and France -- which gets about 80 percent of its
electricity from nuclear power -- recycle nuclear fuel, but President Ford ...
The big question is what to do with SPENT FUEL. Spent fuel has lots of radioactive fission products.
Simple answer ... reprocess the stuff.
For a 1000 lb fuel bundle that was originally 6% enriched fuel, maybe 30 of the 60 lbs of U235 is gone, and some of the U238 was converted to Pu239. Pull out the Plutonium and Uranium, the fuel cladding (Zirconium) for re-use. Pull out the radioactive fission products (about 30 pounds.) Vitrify the fission products (mix with molten glass) then put them in stainless steel canisters and bury them.
(A typical power reactor might have about 180 fuel bundles, and 1/3 of the bundles are swapped out every 1 - 3 years, typical cycle is 18 months. Typically, power plants will discharge the fuel bundles and let them cool off in a spent fuel pool for about 10-15 years before removal from the spent fuel pool. This is when the starting the reprocessing should occur; at this point, decay heat is very small, and the radioactivity levels are somewhat diminished.)
Hint ... make the canisters recoverable. Fission products contain valuable rare-earth elements that, about 700 years later, the material will be fairly non-radioactive ... less than the original Uranium ore was ... and the rare-earth elements might be used in exotic magnets, superconductor technology, etc.
Much of this reprocesses/vitrification process is proven technology - already done by the French ... who get over 70% of their nation's electric power from nuclear power reactors, and some of them are breeder reactors. The French already do reprocessing of nuclear fuel for the Japanese, who also obtain significant amounts of electric power from nuclear power plants.
Mike
(former Navy Nuclear Engineer)