Originally Posted by JDenyer232  As others have stated nuclear waste has piled up due to political constraints. Only 2% of the uranium is used in the reactor, reprocessing can be easily done but it is not allowed due to the non nuclear ploliferation agreement. There is an experimental reactor that creates more fissionable material than it uses, it's called a fast breeder reactor. The material created is plutonium that can be run in another type of reactor. We are using what is called an open loop cycle, we use it once then call it waste. If we used a closed cycle we would have enough fissionable material to last the US hundreds of years for all our electricity production and only produce small amounts of low level waster rather than a large amount of high level waste. |
Thats interesting....any more information?