Deepwater Horizon Inspections: MMS Skipped Monthly Inspections On Doomed Rig

Frontline: Recycling plutonium eliminates its long-term hazards, whereas spent fuel perpetuates the risk for hundreds of thousands of years.



Response: Recycling plutonium does not "burn it up" or even reduce it significantly. Only about one-third of the plutonium in a MOX fuel element is fissioned when irradiated in a conventional nuclear reactor. And plutonium cannot be reprocessed and recycled indefinitely until eliminated: after three or four cycles (and perhaps only after one or two cycles), the plutonium is too degraded to be re-used. Eventually, even with large-scale plutonium recycling, large amounts of plutonium will remain in spent fuel, and that spent fuel will have to be placed in a repository. So, Frontline's suggestion that reprocessing and recycling eliminate the need for a waste repository is fallacious.
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