France already recycles spent nuclear fuel. In the 1960s, we in the US recycled spent nuclear fuel. We don't recycle nuclear fuel now for two reasons:
1. It is valuable and people steal it. The place it went that it wasn't supposed to go to was Israel. This happened in a small town near Pittsburgh, PA circa 1970. A company called Numec was in the business of reprocessing nuclear fuel. [I almost took a job there in 1968, designing a nuclear battery for a heart pacemaker.]
2. Virgin uranium is so cheap that it is cheaper than recycling. This will change eventually, which is why we keep the spent fuel where we can reach it. The US possesses a lot of MOX fuel made from the plutonium removed from bombs. MOX is essentially free fuel since it was paid for by the process of un-making bombs.
Please read this Book: "Plentiful Energy, The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, 2011. You can download this book free from: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf. Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, are former directors of the nuclear power research lab at Argonne National Lab near Chicago. Get another free book from: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html
Per Till & Chang: The Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] uses "nuclear waste" as fuel and gets 100 times as much energy out of a pound of uranium as the Generation 2 reactors we are using now. The IFR is safer than the Generation 2 reactors, which are safer by far than coal. The IFR is commercially available from GEHitachiPRISM.com
The IFR is meltdown-proof. The IFR can be turned up and down quickly and repeatably. The IFR uses metal fuel that is recycled in a system that makes it difficult to get plutonium239 out of the fuel. To make a good plutonium bomb, you must have almost pure plutonium239. 7% plutonium240 and higher isotopes or other actinides will spoil the bomb. IFR Pyro process recycled fuel is useless for bomb making.
Elements with more protons than uranium are called trans-uranics alias actinides. Actinides are the part of so-called nuclear "waste" that makes it stay radioactive for a long time. The IFR uses up the actinides as fuel. Actinides include plutonium, neptunium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and all of the other "synthetic" elements.
The IFR is the ideal source of electricity since it does not make CO2. The resultant "waste" is very small, will decay in only 300 years and is useful in medicine. The IFR is commercially available now. See: GEHitachiPRISM.com
The following countries either already recycle spent fuel or are experimenting with a recycling process or both:
France, Japan Russia, China, India, South Korea.
The US recycled spent fuel in the 1960s.
Purex process: The old one. Separates out plutonium, but does not separate the isotopes of plutonium. Any bomb made with this plutonium from a powerplant reactor would fizzle. You can't make a plutonium bomb with more than 7% Pu240.
Pyro process: Leaves plutonium mixed with uranium and trans-uranic elements. [All fissionable elements are kept together with uranium]
Other processes [wet] are also under development.
By recycling nuclear fuel, we have a 30,000 [thirty thousand] year supply.
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