© Maxian (via iStockPhoto.

com)

Solution: reuse
Three ways that nuclear waste can be dealt with are reuse, transmutation
and burial. The most common method is burial – you will look at this later.
Some radioactive waste can be reduced by reprocessing, or reusing, some
of the spent fuel.

Fuel reprocessing is a complex technological process which is only performed at a

relatively small number of sites worldwide, for example the COGEMA plant at La
Hague in France and the Sellafield plant in Cumbria in the UK. If the fuel is to be
reprocessed, it first needs to be transported to one of these sites.

On arrival at the site, the fuel is stored under water until it can be handled for
reprocessing. The main reprocessing stages are summarised in the image below.
reprocessing nuclear waste The main stages in

After being separated from the fission products, the uranium and plutonium are
separated from each other. The plutonium may be combined with depleted
uranium from an enrichment plant to form what is known as MOX (mixed oxide)
fuel. MOX has similar characteristics to normal uranium dioxide fuel and it may be
used in place of a proportion of this fuel in the same reactors. There are issues
with the relative proportion of isotopes within MOX and such issues affect the
economic viability of reprocessing fuel. The various stages of reprocessing spent
fuel create a considerable quantity of high-, intermediate- and low-level waste
themselves.

Aside from reprocessing, increased thought is given to other uses of waste. For
example, the fission product molybdenum-99 decays to technetium which is used
in medical tracers. Caesium 137 and strontium-90 can both be used in
radiotherapy. Extraction of these useful isotopes is not always straightforward but
will reduce the quantity of waste that needs storage.

In the next step, you will look at another solution – transmutation.

© The Open University