From what I understand about nuke waste, generally, you can take power plant waste, and process it to get, Plutonium Fuel. Lots of it. Then when you run that thru the plant, the waste that you get has a half-life that are orders of magnitudes shorter.

so the positives are

1. less waste
   
2. drastically shorter lived dangerous waste
   
3. more fuel
   

From what I understand, France does this. Because of this, they can, apparently, store their nuke waste in glass (not regular glass of course).
The US refuses to do this, citing the incredible danger of processing and refining and concentrating material than can make Plutonium bombs. The US, as a consequence, has to deal with fantastically longer radiactivity times and needs to store its waste in dilute mixtures of concrete poured into metal containers wrapped in concrete buried in a mountain.

I'm not 'sold' on anything being a fully viable alternative energy source, but nuke power is the only workable one, currently, and this is a big issue with respect to it.

So, if France making a mistake? Is the US unwise to not process it?

I suspect that the fact that the US has such long times of span to worry about the waste, that there is a side benefit of not processing, in that any storage plans have to be really good, whereas the french glass storage plans seem suspect. Anyone else?

[edit on 7-4-2005 by Nygdan]

I am surprised at the lack of responses to this topic. SO it appears Frances method is far from suspect.

they've been arguing for years what to do with nuclear waste; meanwhile it piles up under the desert in nevada. using it for fuel would be fabulous, as well, it could very well provide a solution for faster space travel, not that i'm a scientist or anything.

Why not use the rods as nuclear weapons?
Supplies the military AND the civilian side of things.

As I work at a nuclear plant, I asked this very question a while ago. The main reason the US does not run repro reactors is because in 1977 President Carter banned their use with an Executive Order. I do believe there is one repro in Washington State (government-run), but I don't know to what extent it is actually used.

It would be great to put all that spent fuel to good use. Turning it into megawatts is a lot more efficient than storing it underneath a mountain.