I try to give both sides of a story and here is the other side of the nuke story I did about the Obama decision on nuke waste.

This is from an article in the WSJ:

So is this material “waste”? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth’s crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.

Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 — which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.

The supposed problem of “nuclear waste” is entirely the result of a the decision in 1976 by President Gerald Ford to suspend reprocessing, which President Jimmy Carter made permanent in 1977. The fear was that agents of foreign powers or terrorists groups would steal plutonium from American plants to manufacture bombs.

That fear has proved to be misguided. If foreign powers want a bomb, they will build their own reactors or enrichment facilities, as North Korea and Iran have done. The task of extracting plutonium from highly radioactive material and fashioning it into a bomb is far beyond the capacities of any terrorist organization.

Mr. Tucker must have missed the report:

Some granite countertops contain levels of uranium high enough to be dangerous to humans, said Rice professor W.J. Llope.

Using a spectrometer, Llope tested 25 varieties of granite bought from Houston-area dealers. In some cases, he said, he found countertops that could expose homeowners to 100 millirems of radiation in just a few months — the annual exposure limit set by the Department of Energy for visitors to nuclear labs.

A pretty good article by William Tucker….but I ask….at what cost?  I think it would have been a better article if he would have given us the start up costs of recycling the spent rods and then the cost of storage of what is left.  Just my thought.