INTRODUCTION
Currently, there are few ways how to improve the waste disposal technologies to solve the problem regarding the management of nuclear energy wastage. Reprocessing is one of the ways that used to recycle nuclear waste and not to eliminate it. Although not a new technology, reprocessing can be part of
the solution to nuclear waste. When nuclear power was first developed, it was assumed
that spent nuclear fuel would go through a process called reprocessing.
HOW IT WORKS?
In
reprocessing, one of the major transuranic wastes, 239Pu, is
extracted from the spent fuel rods. This 239Pu (plutonium-239)
is fissile and can be reused in power plants. The advantages of this process
are somewhat obvious: The volume of waste is lessened and more fuel is created
for nuclear reactors. The idea is to reuse some of the energy
in a fuel rod after it has gone through its first life cycle. Once the
uranium-filled fuel rods that create the nuclear power plant's nuclear
reaction are “spent,” they are cooled for a few years at the reactor
site and are then transported to a reprocessing plant. At the
reprocessing facility the fuel rods are cut up and dissolved in a bath
of nitric acid. Uranium and plutonium are then separated out from the
other highly radioactive wastes in the nitric acid solution. The remaining solution, which is still high-level waste, is typically
blended with glass, a process known as vitrification, and must
ultimately be stored in a deep geologic repository, like the one
proposed at Yucca Mountain.
TO GET A BETTER UNDERSTANDING ABOUT REPROCESSING PROCESS PLEASE VIEW THE VIDEO PROVIDED BELOW ::
SOURCE:
[1] http://library.thinkquest.org/17940/texts/nuclear_waste_future/nuclear_waste_future.html
[2] http://healutah.org/nuclearutah/waste/reprocessing
[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf69.html
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