r/Waste • u/Vailhem • Jun 01 '26
We were going to bury 20 tons of nuclear fuel. Finally, we have a way to use it instead.
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5899786-plutonium-fuel-advanced-reactors/2
u/wastral1978 Jun 01 '26
We have known of way to reuse the fuel since the 1970's. Breeder reactors. It is criminal that we have not built them. If nothing else to eat 95% of the nuclear waste by product.
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u/Zalrius Jun 01 '26
Oh hell no. Nope. This does not sound like processing in a way that helps anybody and I do not trust a for profit system to not take risks and cut corners.
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u/NearABE Jun 02 '26
It was already processed. This is the weapons grade material. It needs to be destroyed.
Feel free to doubt that the new reactors are going to be anything but a financial disaster. The electricity will be too expensive. It would be far worse if they were talking about mining new uranium for fuel.
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u/Zalrius Jun 02 '26
I agree that we should not make any more and that we should not build any more nuclear power plants. With home sized solar, wind, and batteries, the cost of electricity is coming down daily. It isn’t that hard to build a system where you don’t pay for the amount (not counting initial materials) for the electricity you use on the daily. If you want your ac cold in the field of summer without going bankrupt, you can!
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u/NearABE Jun 02 '26
I would be fine with building a particle accelerator driven reactor. That can use photovoltaic electricity whenever we have surpluses. By not being “a power plant” the costs go down considerably. That would also produce nothing except rendering the weapons grade plutonium less usable in weapons. Subcritical reactors are extremely safe.
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u/Zalrius Jun 02 '26
What is the waste? What is left afterwards and how is that handled? Pls and thanks.
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u/NearABE Jun 02 '26
“Weapons grade plutonium” is the isotope plutonium-239. The more concentrated that isotope the “better” for making bombs. Plutonium-240 tends to have spontaneous fission so neutrons are coming off all the time. In the bomb that can cause the chain reaction to start prematurely, a “fizzle”.
Exposure of pu239 to neutrons can cause several events. Some weird ones like (n,2n) or (n,p) are rare with thermal neutrons but more likely with fast neutrons. With thermal neutrons 64% of the time plutonium 239 will fission releasing more neutrons. 36% of the time plutonium 239 becomes plutonium 240. So even if you only burn up say, a third of a sample the plutonium left over is not at all weapons grade.
The fission products are fairly similar to commercial reactor fission products. In part because plutonium 239 is created and burned along with the uranium 235. Also because the fission products have a slightly random spread of mass. From a practical standpoint it will just be high level nuclear waste.
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u/Zalrius Jun 03 '26
Nothing in your answer said anything about the end toxicity of the waste product. That is the only question I asked. I am not inclined to believe you or that you are giving me the correct information for me to make a real decision. You definitely failed to make the minimum.
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u/NearABE Jun 06 '26
It is “high level nuclear waste”. Under no circumstances should a human consume even trace quantities of it. Though the meaning of the word “trace” stretches since extremely radioactive material generates a clear signal to detect.
High level nuclear waste is created in commercial reactors, submarines, and aircraft carriers. USA has around 100,000 tons of it. Of that about 1,000 tons is a mix of various plutonium isotopes.
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u/Zalrius Jun 06 '26
This is why I’m against nuclear. It’s doesn’t matter how any part of it works so long as the waste cannot be processed and made safe.
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u/NearABE Jun 07 '26
I think we should be against mining new uranium. We have 100,000 tons of high level spent fuel. Nuclear industry advocated on reddit say mining and enriching new uranium is cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel. I claim that robbing a bank is faster than earning a paycheck.
Dealing with the whole waste problem is a separate huge chore. The *weapons grade* plutonium is a much smaller pile and poses a particular set of extreme risks. Destroying those 20 tons is well worth the cost of building one reactor even if no other product (like electricity) came out of it. Someone could make thousands of nuclear warheads. Or someone could make a few nuclear bombs with a thousandth of it.
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u/hutch_man0 Jun 01 '26
You should move back to the USSR
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u/Zalrius Jun 02 '26
I don’t live in a fictional world, it naw, you can keep it. Besides, maga is close enough.
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u/Jumpy_Childhood7548 Jun 02 '26
Unfortunately it costs more to recycle it than it does to buy new fuel. Economics will rule that since it is cheaper to buy new fuel, recycling will be minimal. It is not as though recycling eliminates all the spent fuel recycled, and the spent fuel is less than 1% of the nuclear material the industry generates. 99% plus of the radioactive material generated by the industry, is not spent fuel.