Comment Re:noooo (Score 1) 560
Just about all European players have or do reprocess -- France at Cap de la Hague, the UK at Sellafield. It turns out to be
remarkably messy, difficult and expensive, and very prone to radiation leaks of one kind or another. It was only really economic when there was a military market for the plutonium at basically "any price".
The problems are not fundamental, they are all engineering, but there were lots of them, and they never really stopped. You're working with something that has a horribly mixed chemical composition, and was designed (as a fuel element) to be tough enough to survive inside a reactor for a few years. You have to dissove everything in loads of hot concentrated nitric acid just to get started, so now you've got industriial quantities of hot radioactive acid laced with a not exactly known mixture of salts, plus insoluble sludge of one kind or another gunging everything up. And you can't ever go into the plant to unjam a conveyer, clear a stuck valve or clean a filter.