The cost of today's nuclear plants is horrendously more expensive than that of coal if you made the industry pay the cost of the research, the cost of the cleanup, and more importantly the cost for the next 10,000+ years of babysitting its refuse.
"We've" already paid for the (IFR)research. While the 40..50 billion into ITER (so far) percolates,,, why not let's save our iteration of 'civilization',,, that of the industrialized nations of the world;)
Basically,
reprocessing IFR fuel consists of two simple steps: 1. fission fragments are removed from the fuel, and 2. unused fuel is recovered, along with the transuranic elements (sometimes called actinides). Normally, the transuranic elements would go to the waste stream with the fission products, but in the IFR, they are kept with the fuel and sent back to the reactor to also serve as fuel. In the above description, note that the waste stream consists of only the fission products. The result is that instead of a waste that remains radioactive for many thousands of years, as would be the case if the transuranic elements were present, the radioactivity in the waste will decay to a value less than that of the original uranium ore in about 200 years
Vitrify them, dump these into the caverness depths, and forget about them~
"..it became obvious to us that one could put a total reactor concept together that would at the same time give you safety of a kind that reactors today don't have, that would allow complete recycling of the fuel, and thus extension of the ability to produce energy (very roughly, by a factor of 100), and also a waste product that did not contain the most dangerous elements. So with one concept you attack all of the principal real issues that there are for the use of nuclear energy."
Interview w/ Dr Charles Till
Nuclear physicist and associate lab director at Argonne National Laboratory West in Idaho. He is co-developer of the Integral Fast Reactor, an inherently safe nuclear reactor with a closed fuel cycle.
