Nuclear energy, can someone explain why this would not work?

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If the 'spent' fuel rods that we use in the US are so hot that they have a half life of half a billion years or whatever, can someone explain why we don't try this. If the rods are that hot, why cant you build a small reactor. Not a zillion megawatt reactor but small ones. That could recycle these rods. Build these outside of large consumption areas. Like LA, or NY You don't haft to supply 5 states worth of power for this to work. Large cities could have their own power plants. That would mean far less loss on transmission lines, and a good way of using up these spent rods. These plants could be built so that they are safe. The technology is there to do that. They could as well be built to withstand any threat of terrorists attack. Once these rods are used up, then the disposal would be much easier, power should be cheaper and the overall benefit to the eendowment should be better as well.
 
You can't re-use the "spent" rods because they have become unstable.

The DOE and Westinghouse are building a spent fuel reprocessing facility at the Savannah River Site (a nuclear power facility in western South Carolina) that will be able to take the "spent" rods and reprocess them into a stable form that can be re-used. It does require a different type of reactor for the end user though. The end product is a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel that cannot be used in a regular reactor. There are a number of MOX reactors already in existence in the country.
 
The contents in the rods have to be separated out first. Remember we all are supposed to be afraid of terrorists at all time, so we can't have these things being moved around or the boogieman might get them (and would die a horrible death before they had them in their possession for very long, but forget about that). Some Japanese company, I think it was Toshiba, builds very small reactors (5 mw instead of 5000 mw) that use a design that makes it pretty much impossible to either melt down or be used as a weapon of any type. Some extremists are against any type of nuclear reactor, some energy companies would hate to see their market share fall, and too many people are uneducated and prefer to remain that way.
 
We had several facilities to do this up until the oil company funded environmental groups and president Carter got them shut down. Now only france, japan, russia, the UK and india have facilities for this work although i understand China is working on one. With reprocessing there will never be nuclear waste to dispose of and nuclear materials will last millions of years instead of the 5 to 10 that they do now with the storage instead of recycling policy.
 
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