Sorry, VRB, but those articles, although technically correct, are highly misleading, misleading to the point of being scientific gibberish.
Uranium and Cesium are only two of many potentially hazardous radioactive contaminants in the thousands of tons of spent fuel scattered all over the country, and radio isotopes are chemically identical to their non-radioactive counterparts, so there is no chemical means of separating them.
You have to dissolve the entire fuel assemblies in acid and go through a long series of chemical reactions to separate the different atoms, all done in a facility that resembles a chemical refinery in complexity and size and run by remote control because it is so dangerous. The process of isolating the highly toxic high level wastes also generates enormous amounts of low-level radioactive wastes.
This is not impossible, the tech has been around for decades, but it is dangerous and it is expensive. That is why the industry has done nothing to reprocess spent fuel. They want the profits of nuclear power, but not the expense of cleaning up, or the legal responsibility if something goes wrong.
Current Events » in reply to Re: US licenses first nuclear reactors since 1978
Re: US licenses first nuclear reactors since 1978
