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Once the fuel rods have been expended there is nothing you can do to recycle them

That's not according to what I have read-- From this:

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. ...

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 ...

Thanks for the post, I was about to say the same thing, but your documentation is much better. If I remember correctly, "spent" nuclear fuel rods have merely fallen below the parameters necessary to sustain a fission reaction because fuel density has dropped below the necessary concentration. So, by reprocessing, the nuclear material brought back to a density that will sustain a fission reaction. Someone somewhere probably has a better take on this, though.

Cogema leads the world in uranium production, MOX fuel fabrication and spent fuel recycling, and it is the world's second largest uranium enricher after the Department of Energy.

If recycling spent fuel rods is true than we have a renewable fuel source through nuclear fission power plants. That is great for our society. Too bad the idiots in Chernobyl made nuclear power plants look so bad.