[backhoe]

IMO, it's pointless and rather silly.

What we need to do is nullify that foolish law from Jimmy Carter's era that outlaws reprocessing of nuclear waste, recycle it like the French- and others- have done for decades, and be done with the whole "storage issue" once & for all.

[2nd_Amendment_Defender]

What we need to do is nullify that foolish law from Jimmy Carter's era that outlaws reprocessing of nuclear waste, recycle it like the French- and others- have done for decades, and be done with the whole "storage issue" once & for all.

Once the fuel rods have been expended there is nothing you can do to recycle them. Burying them in concrete and putting security around the waste is the only option.

But nuclear energy creates very little waste. That is why I support nuclear energy.

[drmatt]

I agree that we should reprocess and recycle nuclear fuel, but the plutonium in question here is surplus plutonium removed from retired nuclear weapons. The plan in the U.S. is to blend this plutonium with natural or low-enriched uranium and burn the fuel as a mixed uranium/plutonium oxide (MOX) in existing light water nuclear reactors. This fuel would be manufactured at the DOE Savannah River Site (SRS) and then sent to the candidate reactors, but as usual the DOE is way behind on this project, so the plutonium would have to be stored at SRS for longer than anticipated. But it really presents no concern being stored on a highly secured government site. The Governor is just doing some political grandstanding to get his name in the news. BTW, the MOX option for plutonium disposition is a dumb idea in my opinion because it actually makes more plutonium than it destroys, because uranium breeds plutonium. All you are doing is degrading the plutonium a bit and mixing it up with some radioactive fission products. Eventually, the spent fuel, along with the spent fuel from 100 other reactors, will be sent to Yucca Mountain for permanent geological disposal. But will it be permanent? There will be roughly 7000 canisters in Yucca Mountain, with each canister containing sufficient plutonium to manufacture 5 to 10 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons. After a few hundred years, the radiation barrier will be greatly diminished, and a clandestine intruder could recover a canister with little difficulty. Are we just planting seeds for a future terrorist? Some advanced reactor designs, like the modular helium reactor, can burn the plutonium directly, destroying 90% of the plutonium in a single pass. This deep-burn option eliminates any long-term proliferation risks. Furthermore, the spent fuel is contained by multiple layers of ceramic coatings that are inert in groundwater environments for hundreds of thousands to millions of years. It's the perfect solution for both the plutonium disposition and nuclear waste disposal problem, and several major utilities (e.g. Entergy) have expressed interest in this design for producing both electricity and hydrogen. Because of the ceramic fuel and other design features, the reactor is passively safe and can withstand complete loss of cooling without damaging the reactor and releasing radioactivity to the environment. The only thing stopping its development are a bunch of hardheads at the Department of Energy that are fixated on MOX or other nutty options like liquid sodium reactors.

[Paul_Denton]

Agree. Actually use that still perfectly good (with reprocessing of course) fuel instead of letting it go to waste.