Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented. Natural uranium isn't very expensive and separating the plutonium from spent fuel doesn't save much on waste disposal costs either. The US canceled a new MOX plant just 7 years ago due to cost and schedule problems:
Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.
The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:
The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.
deepsun · 2h ago
Also, nuclear waste is a very small problem, compared to other wastes. Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.
In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.
cameldrv · 1h ago
The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.
No comments yet
benlivengood · 11m ago
We can't even agree to keep under 2°C warming in 100 years, so I am also confused about why people are worried about waste that lasts 10K years. My guess is that they actually worry it will be leaked during their lifetime, whereas they know X° warming is beyond their lifetime.
throw0101d · 1h ago
> Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.
For some definition of "active".
The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.
I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.
deepsun · 1h ago
Sorry, but you're wrong. I took some radiation safety classes, and the main point I got from that is that "it depends". For example, alpha- and beta-radiation are often more dangerous than gamma, because gamma is easier to detect and measure.
People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.
(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
deepsun · 26m ago
Why, if it's in sealed casks underground, than yes, gamma is the only thing to worry about. My whole comment was about nuclear waste danger and its associated costs, not about danger of an non-compromised waste storage facility.
Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
blibble · 48m ago
it's fine as long as it doesn't get out of its flask
which it will do eventually, if it's left out in the open
it needs to be buried
reducing the volume via reprocessing helps
assuming you can do something with the 97% of "useful" stuff extracted (which the UK has mostly failed at, and now stores it in a warehouse)
74B5 · 14m ago
And then eventually, water seeps in. Like in the german Asse II mine, that is planned to be evacuated, which will be a major challenge.
It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?
I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic forever.
cycomanic · 29m ago
The nuclear waste even without the radiation is going to be toxic. Anything with even trace amount of plutonium left (which has a half life time > 200,000 years), will be toxic (much more than e.g. mercury).
mlyle · 8m ago
Eh, I don't think I agree. Let's talk about the long-lived isotopes: Pu-239 and Pu-242.
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
kibwen · 26m ago
In addition to what the sibling commenter said, at the scale of human civilization, 10,000 years is forever.
lesuorac · 4m ago
10,000 years may be forever but it's a rounding error compared to the "half-life" of lead that other power plants produce.
jjk166 · 28m ago
Admittedly, a lot of spent nuclear fuel waste is also toxic heavy metals and will remain so long after it stops being a radiation hazard.
credit_guy · 1h ago
Many of the proposed new designs use higher enriched uranium, with up to 20% U-235. I expect that if they could work with 5% they would, but they can't. So from here I conclude that their waste might contain a much higher level of U-235 than the current PWRs, for example 3-5%. This would make it good for burning in a PWR, but of course, you need to first clean it up, and that requires processing.
No comments yet
CGMthrowaway · 1h ago
> Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented.
All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.
> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.
Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?
And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).
It’s a constant heat producer. Can’t we use it just for that? Store it somewhere and transfer the heat with traditional liquid cooling/heat exchanger methods?
Store it up in the permafrost regions. Heat greenhouses.
philipkglass · 1h ago
Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:
I don’t really foresee it being packaged out. But maybe a heat exchanger that uses the main long term storage pile
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.
meepmorp · 24m ago
Ok, but couldn't we just to the part where we somehow extract usable energy from nuclear waste without the subsequent abandonment?
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.
If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.
(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”
duskwuff · 2h ago
A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.
(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)
cycomanic · 23m ago
This is also one of the big downsides of reprocessing that always gets ignored, when people talk about the waste "reduction". Yes you make a portion of the unusable fission material usable again, but you create large amounts of low level radioactive (& toxic) waste in the process. This still needs to be handled.
itishappy · 1h ago
I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.
epistasis · 22m ago
The thing that surprises me about nuclear power is the huge amount of enthusiasm right now, without technological wins that might inspire such enthusiasm.
If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.
Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.
The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.
kulahan · 14m ago
The enthusiasm is very easy to understand.
Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
Geothermal: regionally locked
Wind: unpredictable
Hydro: all the good spots are already being used
Coal/oil/gas: too dirty
Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
mlyle · 4m ago
Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.
We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.
Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
H8crilA · 10m ago
I am a nuclear fanboy not because it promises technological breakthroughs (like you wrote, there probably won't be many or even any), but because there just isn't any other option that can deliver continuous power without messing up the climate. I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all. I am an even bigger fan of solar power, but are we really going to have enough battery capacity to reliably run entire countries?
yk · 1h ago
I'm confused the article sometimes talks sometimes about transmutation, that is turning problematic isotopes into ones with shorter half life and theoretically gaining energy in the process, and sometimes about reprocessing, taking spent fuel and essentially recycling to get usable fuel again.
vavooom · 3h ago
"The company will separate out valuable isotopes such as Strontium-90, which has fuel applications in marine and aerospace engineering, and use neutrons to transmute the rest into shorter-lived isotopes"
From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...
Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.
The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:
https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-02/company-developing-pa...
The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.
In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.
No comments yet
For some definition of "active".
The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.
I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.
People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-used-nuclear-fuel/how-is-it-stor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
Are you telling me it's unsafe? Someone better tell Madison Hill:
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
Or Paris Ortiz-Wines:
* https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
which it will do eventually, if it's left out in the open
it needs to be buried
reducing the volume via reprocessing helps
assuming you can do something with the 97% of "useful" stuff extracted (which the UK has mostly failed at, and now stores it in a warehouse)
https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/history-of-the-...
It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?
I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
No comments yet
All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.
(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)
And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.
(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”
(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)
If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.
Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.
The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.
Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
Geothermal: regionally locked
Wind: unpredictable
Hydro: all the good spots are already being used
Coal/oil/gas: too dirty
Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.
Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90