Spent fuel

Nuclear fuel removed from a reactor once it can no longer usefully sustain the chain reaction. It is highly radioactive and still produces decay heat, so it is first cooled for several years in water pools, then usually moved to dry storage casks, and eventually either reprocessed or placed in a deep geological repository; no country yet runs such a repository routinely for commercial spent fuel, though Finland is furthest along. Every fission reactor produces spent fuel, or in a molten-salt reactor a used fuel salt. Designs differ in how much they produce for each unit of energy, in its form, and in how long its radioactivity lasts, so a claim of 'less waste' should say whether it means volume, mass or radioactivity. Back-end capacity is tracked in this dataset as its own category.

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concept:spent-fuel

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