Long term nuclear waste storage messaging

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4 points·tomasreimers··5 comments

We go to a lot of effort to try to safeguard storage of spent fuel. But did you know such fuel still has 90% of its energy and can be reused? https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... we just choose to throw it away while other governments choose to reuse it.

"reprocessing is technically demanding and expensive. It also still also produces some amount of high-level waste" https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finla...

Sure, but since some states do it, it seems to me that getting 3 or 5 times the energy out our your fule before discarding it is something we should explore even if we ultimately bury it in the end.

> getting 3 or 5 times the energy

What do you mean '3 to 5 times the energy'? By what measure? How does that work? What's the cost? What are the risks?

Well not being an expert in the field, this is admittedly an extrapolation. However, what I have read is that after first use, spent fule still has 90% of its energy. Potentially we discard 9 times the available energy. I offered 3 to 5 times as I'm sure we would not get 9 times but maybe we could or maybe we could only recycle it once given our current science. Still getting twice the energy seems like a great idea to me.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-....

That nievely suggest to me that there is a bunch left to use. Hence why some countries recycle it back into fule.

I dont know how the recycling process works. The risks as stated by several articles seem to be that during reprocessing bad actors could get a hold of it.

Why are you so resistant to the idea that we might recycle and reuse spent fule rather than mine, refine, and discard new fule?

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