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Typically kept on site in concrete casks. The spent fuel takes up shockingly little space. At least around where I am, "tax payers" don't foot the bill.
by TheHypnotist 7y ago
Typically kept on site in concrete casks. The spent fuel takes up shockingly little space. At least around where I am, "tax payers" don't foot the bill.
- logfromblammo 7y agoAlso, the "spent" fuel can still be used as fuel in a different type of reactor (fast-neutron), or reprocessed to recover the unused fuel back into slow-neutron light-water reactor fuel. The reason why it sits in on-site storage is because on-site storage is about the only option in the US, due to anti-proliferation regulation, and the politicization of Yucca Mountain. France's 55+ reactors send their spent fuel to a single facility in La Hague, where it only consumes half the facility's capacity. The remaining capacity is resold to other countries' nuclear plants, inasmuch as other countries still operate nuclear plants after Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. Reprocessing is about 6% the cost of their entire nuclear program. The program in turn can supply about 1/6th of the program's nuclear fuel. But they stockpile it, unenriched, whenever original processing of mined uranium ores would be cheaper. The non-Pu, non-U radioactives still have to be extracted in a separate step or be buried somewhere for their 100-year cooling-off period, but the volume is much lower than it would otherwise be without reprocessing. If Yucca Mtn were ever fully opened, and if it took only post-reprocessing waste, it could bury all the world's vitrified waste until it becomes cooler than the average parking lot, much more safely than the current status quo.