Something you might not know about the nuclear waste chain
 

So it seems that the hoopla about dumping spent fuel rods is predicated on the very mistaken belief that they are useless. Turns out that spent rods are anything but useless. In fact, they can even be a source of money.

You see a fuel rod is spent only when about half of its U235 is converted via fission. In the end only 3% of the rod is actually made of unusable material and the rest could continue to fission quite happily if this material was removed. Now France has been cleaning nuclear fuel like this since the 60s quite easily. Which as one might expect has drastically reduced their nuclear waste problem. It also partially explains why no one seems to mind nuclear power so much in France.

You may be asking yourself why the US is doing the absolutely idiotic thing and planing on burying a potential energy resource that also happens to be highly polluting. (Did I mention that the fission products alone are both less reactive and stay reactive for significantly less time then the left over U235 and U238. Thus this cleaned waste is both considerably less and considerably safer.) The answer is some what ironic in a bureaucratic sense. See one of these products that are removed happens to be Plutonium 239 which is good for making bombs. Back in March 1977 Jimmy Carter indefinitely suspended commercial reprocessing in the US because India demonstrated the ability to make a bomb from the reprocessing materials.

Ok so its a good idea to stop everyone from getting the bomb. However, wouldn't it seem more prudent to keep reprocessing the spent fuel and simply limit who it gets sold to? So today we are paying for a knee jerk Cold War-ish reaction by a former president. As clearly seen from France's example basically no other country stopped reprocessing so the effect was negligible at best. Granted reprocessing is restarting slowly in the US but we are now so far behind, and the stigma attached to the process and nuclear energy in general is so great, that we may very well run into storage problems before reprocessing becomes feasible. Through all this the government continues to funnel obscene amounts of money at Yucca mountain and almost completely ignore reprocessing which is by far a better option. The continued governmental dragging of the feat and the lag time in reinstating reprocessing seem both to derive specifically from the stigma of the plutonium by product.

So the question here is, does this make nuclear power more attractive to anyone; especially those who are opposed to nuclear energy outright?

Oh and wiki-links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Used_nuclear_fuel

It's....it's like throwing away the coal whle it's still burning!

I wish I could convince other people of this. Our country is completely nuclear free, and we still refuse American ships coming here.

As far as I knew it was generally cheaper to avoid reprocessing and just get new rods as far as I knew. I always thought that was they didn't reprocess...

Yeah, our country is founded on knee-jerk reactions supplying laws squelching out the evil evil deeds like this.

Stuff like this is top of the totem pole - Stuff at the bottom is those absurd laws you hear about in the Bathroom Reader, like not having more than six camels on the same sidewalk.

Storing spent rods as in actually make absolutely no sense logically. They still have a great deal of fissile material. Beyond that because of the high Uranium and Plutonium amounts it stays dangerous radioactive for a long time due to long half lives. This means you have to store it somewhere crazy expensive, Yucca mountain, in something crazy expensive, those stupid containers. With reprocessing you mix in a little chemicals run it through a centrifuge a few hundred/thousand times. After that you get to sell back about 90% of the material, and its a rather rare expensive material at that. Whats left is both less radioactive and becomes safe faster because of the lower half-lifes of the majority of the materials. Economically it makes so much sense you wonder why it didn't jump up and slap people in the face. Then you realize the technology was around, well understood, and being used in the 40s. It just so happens it was out lawed in some places due to bad PR and cold-war fears.

With oversight during design, construction, and operation nuclear plants are very safe. I'd say they are almost extremely safe. Reprocessing really removes the last hurdle by making the waste problem a relative non-issue. We could put all the waste under Yucca mountain and have room for about 9 times more. Plus Yucca would be seriously over engineered and provide substantially more protection than needed; so to would those shipping crates. I really hope we can take a cue from France and build some more plants.

I've always been bothered by the waste of perfectly good nuclear material. Plutonium could probably fuel power plants, itself, and a process called "reseeding" actually adds something like 50% of the spent rod's life back the first time, 50% of the second life the second time, and so on. It's enough to make it a viable option. But I guess they have other uses of higher priority for spent fuel rods. I heard once that Fort Knox was protected by depleted Uranium bullet defense systems, but it may or may not be true. Anyone with a source one way or another would be greatly appreciated.

All that is true but it still actually cheaper just to throw out the rods the old rods without reprocessing and dig up new ones as long as you don't care about the environment and want to make a quick buck.
Reprocessing is economically better in the long term but in the short term it is not as cheap. This issue brings up a whole raft of other problems of sustainabilty and the process of economic growth that we shouldn't get into.

And if its mandated against why don't people try and get a referenda against it? That's what democracy is for.

Actually, given you have to mine, process and ship the new fuel rods, I think you'll find reprocessing actually ends up cheaper. Not to mention the huge decrease in cost of waste storage.