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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (21279)	5/4/1998 3:06:00 PM
From: LoLoLoLita	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Alex, Fuel reprocessing is an interesting topic. President Jimmy Carter was responsible for the current U.S. policy that spent fuel from commercial power reactors would not be reprocessed. In contrast, from the very earliest days of the Manhattan Project the military uses of nuclear energy have always done reprocessing. These military uses (currently done by DoD and DOE) include test reactors, production reactors, as well as naval nuclear reactors. When uranium fuel enriched with U-235 is "burned" in a reactor, some of the U-238 present is transmuted to Pu-239, which is very useful in making nuclear weapons. The reason Jimmy Carter decided that we would not reprocess, is because he thought that by doing so we would prevent or minimize proliferation. History since has shown us to be unique among all the nuclear weapons powers in that we are the only country with major nuclear programs that does not reprocess spent fuel from commercial reactors. IMO, reprocessing spent fuel can (and is!) be done safely. By doing so, we would make use of the Pu-239 in reactors instead of hoping to dump it all into the ground. Reprocessing spent fuel minimizes the volume of waste that requires disposal, and allows recovery of isotopes with economic value such as Cs-137. There have been numerous delays in the siting and development of a permanent "repository" for spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors. In the end, Congress seemed to just get disgusted with DOE's lack of progress with being able to show that they had chosen a good site (and a good method) at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and has pretty much forced them to go ahead. DOE in the past made legally binding commitments to the commercial power reactor operators that the govt. would develop a depository and accept waste by a date certain. This date has either already passed, or is soon. Yucca Mountain is nowhere near being in a position to accept waste. But politics rules over science, in this case at least. I personally believe that recycling spent fuel has many environmental advantages over our current "one-pass" cycle, which requires continual new sources of uranium from mines, and the enrichment of that uranium so that there is enough of the fissionable U-235 to support a chain reaction in an LWR.