The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste [video]
I think the picture painted here is a bit on the rosy side. For example, at 4:22 a lady from Oklo says &quot;we just don&#x27;t have the commercial facility to do so [burn nuclear waste]. But the technology is there&quot;. What she fails to mention is that a technology that is not approved by the NRC is as good as not existing. We don&#x27;t want another Chernobyl, do we? Well, the NRC has looked at their (Oklo&#x27;s) technology, and said &quot;no, thank you&quot; [1].<p>So, what the lady should have said at 4:22 is &quot;The technology is almost there, if we work hard we might iron out all the issues in 10 years. But more realistically in 20.&quot;<p>Once they iron out those issues, they will have a fast reactor that could burn &quot;nuclear waste&quot;. In reality, it will turn out that it will be orders of magnitude cheaper to burn freshly mined uranium, and they&#x27;ll do just that. Why? Because nuclear waste contains all sorts of transuranic elements, like Neptunium, Plutonium, Americium, Curium, and each of them with several isotopes. Some of these isotopes are friendly to being burned in a reactor, but some not. Some are highly radioactive, while regular nuclear fuel is not. Getting reasonably &quot;clean&quot; fuel out of this is expensive.<p>But even if expense is not an issue, getting the NRC to approve the fuel will be another one. The NRC does not approve only reactor designs, but also everything that has to do with reactor operations, including nuclear fuel. There are currently several applications to approve uranium fuel where U-235 is enriched to a bit higher than 5%. Six weeks ago the NRC gave an approval to Framatome [2] that will allow Framatome to eventually enrich fuel to 8%, however, I think they will need a few more approvals until that fuel will burn in reactors.<p>It takes many years for the NRC to give an approval to even such a simple thing as increasing enrichment from 5% to 8%, but otherwise keeping everything the same. Imagine how long it would take them to allow someone to burn a fuel that is essentially a random mix of a bunch of radioisotopes.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;reactors&#x2F;new-reactors&#x2F;large-lwr&#x2F;col&#x2F;aurora-oklo.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;reactors&#x2F;new-reactors&#x2F;large-lwr&#x2F;col&#x2F;auro...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.world-nuclear-news.org&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;NRC-approves-use-of-Framatome-codes-in-advanced-nu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.world-nuclear-news.org&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;NRC-approves-use...</a>