Reply #150: OK - I'll address the specifics.

[PamW]

Virtually all other European countries, apart from the United Kingdom, have abandoned reprocessing and the U.K. plans to end its reprocessing within the next decade. France’s last foreign reprocessing customer for commercial fuel is the Netherlands, which has only a single small 34-year-old power-reactor, and Italy, which ceased generating nuclear electricity after the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident in the Ukraine.
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The first sentence seems to imply that reprocessing was quite popular in Europe. Truth is, the
only countries that made the investment in reprocessing plants were Great Britain and
France. So with the UK discontinuing reprocessing, that means one of the two stopped.

France did have another big reprocessing customer - Japan.

However, Japan no longer uses France's reprocessing facilities.

It's not that Japan has stopped reprocessing. They like reprocessing so much
that they built their OWN reprocessing plant. They originally built
a small plant at Tokai, but their current full-scale plant is located at
Rokkasho:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokkasho_Reprocessing_Plant

Even though France lost foreign customers because those customers found it was
more profitable to reprocess spent nuclear fuel for themselves rather than to
pay France to do it; that doesn't mean that reprocessing is all for naught.

Reprocessing not only serves to produce more fuel, it is also a spent fuel disposal
technique. Since all the long-lived actinides are recycled, reprocessing leaves one
with a waste stream consisting of only short-lived fission products.

Remember when I told you to read the interview PBS's Frontline did with nuclear physicist
Dr. Charles Till of Argonne National Laboratory:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products,
that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours,
days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones
that are not very radioactive


So much for the "multi-thousand year half-life" problem the anti-nukes like to
blather about. Gone!

PamW