Where does excess uranium 238 goes?

Question

Natural uranium is 0.7% U-235 and the rest is U-238. For nuclear reactor you need enriched uranium with higher percentage of U-235. But what to do with U-238 if it’s useless as reactor fuel, as a nuclear weapon, and still radioactive to use it as regular material.

In: Physics

Answer 1

In addition to what others have said: Excess uranium hexafluoride with uranium 238 from the enrichment process is a giant problem. It’s gas that is basically bad for everything and it’s not worth it to turn it back into uranium and fluorine. The US alone has several hundred thousand tons of it that sit in rusting steel tanks.