4 ms·

Because burning it involves superheated, radioactive phosphoric acid.

• ars 11y ago
  What are you talking about? No it doesn't.
  • yk 11y ago
    The designs I have seen dissolve the spent nuclear fuel in phosphoric acid and then operate with liquid fuel. ( Perhaps there are proposals that do not operate like that, but I think you want to homogenize the fuel as much as possible which means some kind of liquid fuel.)
    • ars 11y ago
      How do you superheat phosphoric acid? Wouldn't it dissociate? It's not used for an active reactor, but rather to dissolve cold fuel and extract more usable uranium. Liquid fuel reactors don't use phosphoric acid, they use uranium tetrafluoride (a salt) or water.
      • yk 11y ago
        No, you want to burn all the short lived isotopes, not just Uranium. So the designs I am talking about use spend fuel dissolved in acid as a fuel. There is also spent fuel recycling, where you take Uranium and Plutonium out of spent fuel and manufacture MOX fuel, but that is an entirely different process.