With the half life of the radioactive metals used in the fuel rods being thousands of years, the fuel used in reacors, i would think, should last for similar amounts of time. How come nuclear plants go through large ammount of spent fuel that then has to be stored?
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Uranium-235’s half-life is 700 *million* years. It’s not even warm to the touch. Fissioning it releases much more energy than it would decaying to lead, and much, *much*, **much** faster. So that’s useful for human purposes.
I wouldn’t say it’s a large amount of spent fuel, considering the amount of energy released. Each fuel pellet — the size of a fingertip — releases about as much a ton of coal.
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