[HN Gopher] Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S.
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Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S.
Author : rbanffy
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-07-09 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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.
| deepsun wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff
| with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic
| forever.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| In addition to what the sibling commenter said, at the
| scale of human civilization, 10,000 years _is_ forever.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 10,000 years may be forever but it's a rounding error
| compared to the "half-life" of lead that other power
| plants produce.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101d wrote:
| So nuclear waste is stored in casks:
|
| * 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/119518497061
| 39361...
|
| (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.)
| blibble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| somanyphotons wrote:
| Ok lets send it on a rocket to a graveyard orbit
| greenavocado wrote:
| What happens when the rocket explodes on the launchpad or
| at several thousand feet ASL?
| deepsun wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| > But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for
| thousand years.
|
| Is that actually based on some sort of science though, or
| is it the same woolly thinking as the linear-no-threshold
| modelling that was popular around the time of Chernobyl?
| What are the actual risks here and how does it compare to
| low exercise or the typical amount of air pollution in a
| large city?
| cameldrv wrote:
| 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.
| benlivengood wrote:
| We can't even agree to keep under 2degC 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 Xdeg warming is beyond their lifetime.
| whycome wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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/)
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident.
| ..
| whycome wrote:
| I don't really foresee it being packaged out. But maybe a
| heat exchanger that uses the main long term storage pile
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ok, but couldn't we just do the part where we somehow
| extract usable energy from nuclear waste without the
| subsequent abandonment?
| AngryData wrote:
| Theoretically yes, but you seriously complicate the storage
| of nuclear materials when you start packing it all together
| and trying to create heat or keep it at any elevated
| temperature for harvesting heat. That is basically the entire
| concept of a nuclear reactor, except now its either a random
| mash of nuclear stuff unless you spend a ton of money
| categorizing and actively monitoring the state of all the
| material put in, but with a less robust cooling system than
| an actual nuke plant and far lower output.
|
| With the expenses involved with all of that, it would
| probably be better to just build multiple geothermal plants
| instead and you don't have to worry about nuclear materials
| at all for similar power output.
|
| To me the only 2 economically feasible strategies I see with
| high level nuclear waste is recycling with some sort of
| breeder reactor program, or dumping it in a deep stable hole
| that is trapped away from any water tables on the order of
| 100,000 years or more, by which point it will just be a
| uniquely rich and and diverse nuclear mineral deposit.
|
| With a breeder reactor though and all the supporting nuclear
| reprocessing facilities, even though it would be a lot of
| work and money, it would be recovering the vast majority of
| potential energy from previously mined and refined nuclear
| materials that you are talking about recovering heat from,
| and in a far more controlled manner that allows us to just
| chuck the material into pretty much any other reactor without
| any significant modifications.
| credit_guy wrote:
| 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.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...)
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| As someone in solar I can tell you unless you are O&O/IPP
| it is not profitable to build without credits, no matter
| what an investment bank says
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| 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).
| pstuart wrote:
| Apparently nuclear waste storage is easier said than done:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_
| r...
| vavooom wrote:
| "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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Strontium is taken up by the body like Calcium, as it's in the
| same group in the periodic table.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I don't think anyone is considering its ingestion. At least I
| hope not, but these are very strange times.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Fwiw supplements containing strontium exist (strontium
| ranelate mostly), which is supposed to assist with
| osteoarthritis symptoms and bone growth.
| rbanffy wrote:
| None with Strontium 90
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| "Taken up" mean it participates in the same sort of
| biological processes
| khuey wrote:
| Strontium-89 injections were indeed used as a palliative
| treatment for bone cancer, though I think they've been
| discontinued.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The short half life makes it less problematic than its 90
| neighbour. It also decays to a stable isotope.
| wffurr wrote:
| Oh boy more "Infinity Rooms". Funny write up on the hazards of
| reprocessing: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-
| own-radiat...
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Nice
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yk wrote:
| 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.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| Oh look at this nuclear power ... no stop looking at solar and
| batteries! That would actually solve the problem!
| epistasis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| > Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech,
| also hilariously inefficient
|
| The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no
| advancements needed.
|
| Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?
|
| > Geothermal
|
| This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal
| is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing
| massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form
| fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have
| some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and
| outputs.
|
| > Wind
|
| Storage solves this today
|
| In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's
| hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing
| what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in
| Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological
| hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes
| everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in
| massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which
| isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by
| regulated monopolies).
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Storage tech exists right now but it's not super widespread
| or reliable (mostly in the "what do I get for my dollar" -
| you can store power all you want but making your investment
| back is a little harder). Degradation has proved to be
| worse than anticipated. Industrial application of Li
| batteries has been repeatedly hamstrung by supply chain,
| demand, tariff, etc. problems. New battery chemistry would
| really be the breakthrough here, anything cheaper and
| better than lithium
| probablypower wrote:
| > The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no
| advancements needed.
|
| The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the
| logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid
| scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd
| need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir,
| or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the
| land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the
| issue is.
| H8crilA wrote:
| 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?
| epistasis wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like
| $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on
| average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is
| far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper
| over the next decade. See for example:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-
| launches...
| eagerpace wrote:
| It's ok to store this stuff until the triggered tech is
| available. Even if it's done in orbit around the moon. This was
| impossible to think about 10 years ago but it's possible in the
| next 10
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