If radioactive waste emits heat, why can’t we use it to produce energy?
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According to this Stanford physics student calculation
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/tilghman1/
Using spent fuel natural radioactive decay as energy source (by pre-heating water for example) provides only a bonus of 0.067% of energy.
That seems to be too low for the nuclear power plant to change their design.
Right now, spent fuel are cooled in cooling pools in which all the heat is wasted by transferring it to cold water so that the pool remain cool and doesn’t produce any steam that could cause an explosion. It makes that the cooling pool doesn’t need to be as blinded as the reactor which is usually at moderately high temperature and pressure.
Spent fuel can be reused though by recycling their uranium and plutonium. Most of it is still usable after a cycle pass through. It’s the amount of fission product that stops the reaction, not the lack of fissile material. This is done in most countries other than the US.
Also, in the future, non-fissile actinides could be extracted and used in a fast neutron reactor, which will increase the amount of energy recoverable by more than 100 (mostly because the main component is U238 which is usable in a fast neutron reactor). It’s not economic to do so right now because uranium is extremely cheap for a given amount of energy and developing new types of reactors that are more efficient but still safe is very expensive.
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