The UK reprocessing plants at least are environmental disasters with a history of large-scale radioactive discharges into the surrounding environment. (Russia's

The UK reprocessing plants at least are environmental disasters with a history of large-scale radioactive discharges into the surrounding environment. (Russia's were even worse, apparently.) They also lost their foreign customers for falsifying data on fuel shipments. They're due to shut down altogether in the next few years as their existing contracts come to an end. Unfortunately, the Sellafield site is probably impossible to decommission safely due to massive contamination and poorly-designed containments with no documentation of the contents. Also, most of the big reprocessing plants out there were originally constructed as part of nuclear weapons programs, including the UK, US, French and Russian ones. They're just not economically viable otherwise.