As the title says; why can’t we just melt down the old fuel rods?
What would happen if we did melt them down?
Couldn’t we mix/contaminate them with another element to dilute the radioactive effects?
Most reactors work by heating water and turning turbines, why can’t we turn the spent fuel pools into a slow running reactors rather then using energy to keep them cool?
In: Physics
I will try to explain what is currently being done in France. Most of the spent fuel is firstly cooled done for a while in actual pools of water. (water is a great biological barrier). After that it is sent to a reprocessing plant where the fission products (aka all of those elements that are “useless”, usually beta decayers) are separated from the plutonium and the uranium. Successively Pu and Uranium are also divided, by using very acid environments and complicated chemistry.
The Pu and the Uranium can then be utilized in a second cycle, in the form of MOX fuel, which is simply a ceramic fuel that contains a specific mixture of Pu and Uranium.
Problem is, when the MOX fuel is irradiated in the 2nd cycle, things get tricky, there’s a lot of bad radio isotopes that are being generated via neutronics capture, like Pu241, Am241 and Cm243. And handling these isotopes becomes very very fucking hard, especially in industrial scale.
That is why, it was decided not to deal with irradiated MOX and dissolve it into a vitreous compound.
The real hope would be being able to reutilize this fuel, but Generation IV reactors are still too complicated to be built, so governments are opting for geological depositorises for now. Hope that answers your question.
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