A Bad Supreme Court Decision Paves the Way for Radioactive Waste Storage in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico

[hunter]

2. Existing light water nuclear power plants extract just a small fraction of the potential energy in their fuel.

It's absurd to call this used fuel "waste" and bury it when we have the technology to reprocess it into fresh fuel.

There are two reasons we don't do that, the first being that mined natural uranium is cheap, the second being unjustified fears that weapons grade plutonium will be extracted from used nuclear fuels.

Extracting weapons grade plutonium or uranium from used nuclear power plant fuels is a difficult and expensive task compared to making these weapons grade materials from scratch using mined natural uranium.

Weapons grade uranium is made by separating the U-235 from the U-238 in mined natural uranium which is a mixture of both. This is what Iran has been doing.

Plutonium is produced in specialized nuclear reactors using mined natural uranium. This is what North Korea has been doing. This is how the U.S.A. made plutonium for bombs at Hanford.

If we fully utilized all the uranium that we've already mined in sophisticated nuclear fuel cycles we could power the world's industry for centuries, which would also make it more difficult to build nuclear weapons as any trade in natural uranium could be considered highly suspicious.