There are currently three serious options on the table. The first is to bury it. We get nothing from this except a bloody great hole in the ground and a bill to match. The second is currently the government's favoured option: mixed oxide processing (Mox). This has already proved to be an expensive fiasco. It produces (when it works at all) fuel that hardly anyone wants, at great cost, and more waste plutonium than we possess already. Its contribution to the electricity supply is feeble, raising the energy extracted from nuclear fuel from 0.6% to 0.8%. Even the government admits that "the value of the fuel to reactor operators is significantly less than the cost of its manufacture". The third option is fast reactors, ideally integral fast reactors. This is the one I favour, and unless you can provide me with a powerful reason why it should not receive serious consideration, it is the option I will continue to promote. ... So which of these options do you support? None of the above is not an answer. Something has to be done with the waste, and unless you have invented a novel solution, one of these three options will need to be deployed. But it is a choice that opponents of nuclear power are refusing to make - and that is not good enough.
The third option is fast reactors, ideally integral fast reactors. This is the one I favour, and unless you can provide me with a powerful reason why it should not receive serious consideration, it is the option I will continue to promote.
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So which of these options do you support? None of the above is not an answer. Something has to be done with the waste, and unless you have invented a novel solution, one of these three options will need to be deployed. But it is a choice that opponents of nuclear power are refusing to make - and that is not good enough.
