– What use has a nuclear reprocessing plant and how does it work?
In: Technology
Uranium is a very valuable element, and plutonium is a very dangerous one. After nuclear fuel has been in a reactor, it still has significant amounts of useful fuel remaining in it. The reprocessing plant takes out the plutonium and adds in some more raw uranium to make new fuel rods that cost a lot less than making new fuel rods from scratch.
The super big problem with this is that plutonium can be used to make bombs. That makes reprocessing plants possible sources of nuclear weapons, and they are very tightly controlled by non-proliferation treaties. Frankly most power plant users are just going to pay more for new rods than subject themselves to the hassles of having a reprocessing plant.
When you put nuclear fuel (uranium) in a nuclear reactor and run it for a long time, you end up with “spent fuel.” This spent fuel still contains some useful elements that could be used for further nuclear fuel, but they are also now mingling with the nasty, radioactive “halves” of the atoms that got split (“fission products”), which make using the fuel very difficult.
A reprocessing plant removes the still-useful elements from the spent fuel — uranium and plutonium. Then you can mix these with some more uranium to make more fuel. This basically “recovers” up to about 30% of the energy of the original fuel.
As for how it works, basically they dissolve the spent fuel in various kinds of acids and do other chemical reactions that target the uranium and plutonium in the spent fuel and separate it from everything else. There are many, many steps to get down to just the stuff you want, and to not have the stuff you don’t want.
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