An aerial view of the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant on the coast of Normandy, France. After eight decades of failures on cost, security, and waste, spent fuel reprocessing is a distraction from the proven nuclear technologies the United States needs to deploy. (US Department of Energy)

Why Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Is Recycling in Name Only

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Reprocessing promises to recycle nuclear waste, but it fails on technology, cost, security, and waste management—and distracts from the nuclear technologies that actually work.

Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, often erroneously conflated with recycling, is the latest in a long list of technologies and products that have exploited human desire for silver-bullet solutions, but in reality deliver more problems than fixes. The formula is a familiar one: a charismatic salesman captures our attention with a product they market as a remedy for a persistent problem; the explanation for how the technology works is muddled or oversimplified; funders and other stakeholders are driven by their desire to believe; and the venture ends in disappointment, wasted money, and sometimes worse. 

The future of nuclear energy is promising, but only if policymakers and industry make smart investment choices that focus on the technologies that work. Reprocessing is a distraction that takes attention away from sensible solutions. 

There are four main reasons why spent fuel reprocessing is a bad idea and should be shelved in favor of the nuclear energy technologies that can actually deliver on their promises.

Why Reprocessing Doesn’t Work as Advertised

The goal of reprocessing is to “recycle” spent fuel, but the two are very different. Reprocessing is a technology that chops up spent nuclear fuel, dissolves it, then separates the resulting slurry into various streams of waste and potentially reusable material. The recycling of that potentially reusable material into new fuel is where the pitch falls short. 

Understanding the technical process helps explain where the problems emerge. When fresh fuel goes into a nuclear power reactor, it is composed only of low-enriched uranium. After the nuclear reaction, spent fuel has a composition broadly binned into four types of elements: low-enriched uranium; plutonium; highly radioactive materials such as strontium and cesium that are collectively called fission products; and ultra-heavy metals like neptunium and americium, which are referred to as minor actinides. The uranium, plutonium, and minor actinides look like reusable assets if separated from the fission products, which are mostly waste. 

However, the varying levels of radiotoxicity, decay........

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