Editor's Note: This story is part of the Feature "Nuclear Fuel
Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth" from the May 2008 Issue
of Scientific American. A Nuclear Renaissance? After decades of
declining interest, nuclear energy is poised for a comeback,
driven by: The quantity of spent fuel so far accumulated by the
U.S. nuclear industry (about 58,000 metric tons) now very nearly
equals the capacity of the cooling pools used to hold such
material at the reactor sites. By midcentury, the amount will
roughly double. Pros & Cons In theory, reprocessing spent fuel
and recycling it in reactors reduces the quantity of uranium
mined and leaves more of the waste in forms that remain
radioactive for only a few centuries rather than many millennia.
But in practice, this approach is problematic because it is
expensive, reduces waste only marginally (unless an extremely
costly and complex recycling infrastructure is built), and
increases the risk that the plutonium in the spent fuel will be
used to make nuclear weapons. P