Reply #46: Thanks for the links. I have never been a big fan of reprocessing.. [View All]

i can see the interest in countries like Japan and France where their uranium usage compared to stockpiles are higher than the global average.

Reprocessing is expensive (both in terms of cost and energy) however countries would rather reprocess their fuel to produce more fuel than have to worry about foreign supplies.

Given the US substantial uranium reserves and the relatively primitive level of technology related to reprocessing (high energy use, lots of caustic chemicals, and limit on amount of recoverable uranium) I see it as a dead end.

Money would be better spent on isotope seperation because most transmutations require at least some separation of isotopes. Even if you are anti-nuclear the ability to transmute something with a 200,000 halflife to one which has a half life of 26 days is a huge advantage. Not magic bullet (not all fission products can be easily transmuted) and we need a cheap source of large number of neutrons (fusion?) but could substantially reduce the amount of long term waste (200K+ year half life).