What can be done with spent fuel?
The two existing strategies of long-term spent nuclear fuel management are called open cycle and closed cycle. The open cycle strategy is to consider that the spent fuel is a high-activity radioactive waste from the time it is unloaded from the reactor, and its isolation or confinement for 4,000 years must be solved in some way. The closed cycle strategy is based on subjecting the spent fuel to a mechanical and chemical process for separating the uranium and plutonium that it still contains from the fission products and transuranics. The recovered uranium and plutonium are used to manufacture new fuel, and the fission products and transuranics constitute the high-activity waste. However, as the plutonium, which is present in appreciable quantities and has a very long life (25,000 years), has been separated, the required confinement time is cut back to only 800 years. This mechanical-chemical process is known as reprocessing or retreatment. If nuclear fuel radioactivity increases 800 mi
