The myth

"Nuclear waste is the deadliest waste in the world. It remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no solution for it."

This is the standard message of anti-nuclear organisations. What they conceal in doing so is something essential: what they call "waste" is 99% unused fuel. It is like throwing away a full battery because you have used 1% — and then complaining that there are so many discarded batteries.

The facts

Current reactors use only 1% of the energy

Conventional light-water reactors utilise approximately 1% of the energy content of the mined uranium. The remaining 99% is called "waste". This is not a technical limitation — it is a political choice. The technology to utilise that remaining 99% already exists. It is simply not deployed at scale, partly because the very organisations that complain about "waste" block every attempt to use it.

!96% of spent fuel is reusable

Of spent fuel (the material that comes out of a reactor), the composition is as follows:

Component Share Status
Reusable uranium ~94% Can serve as fuel again
Plutonium ~1% Excellent fuel for MOX or fast reactors
Fission products ~4% The actual waste
Minor actinides ~1% Fuel for fast reactors

France has been reprocessing spent fuel since the 1960s at the La Hague facility. The reusable uranium and plutonium is recovered and redeployed as MOX fuel. This is not theory — it is established industrial practice.

!Fission products decay rapidly

The 4% fission products are the only actual waste. They are initially highly radioactive, but decay rapidly:

  • After 40 years, the radioactivity has decreased by more than 99.9%.
  • After 300-500 years, the radioactivity is no higher than that of the original uranium ore extracted from the ground.
  • After 50,000 years, the toxicity per gram is comparable to that of aspirin.

That last figure does not come from a nuclear energy lobbyist, but from Rainer Moormann — a former nuclear whistleblower who spent years exposing safety problems at the German AVR reactor. It is precisely he who concludes that the long-term risks of fission products are severely overstated (Moormann, 2021).

!200,000 tonnes of depleted uranium at COVRA: 14,000 years of electricity

In the Netherlands, approximately 200,000 tonnes of depleted uranium are stored at COVRA in Zeeland. Officially, it is "waste" that must be managed. In reality, it is a gigantic energy reserve.

With advanced reactors (fast breeder reactors or molten salt reactors), this depleted uranium can be utilised. The potential energy content:

Parameter Value
Depleted uranium stored at COVRA ~200,000 tonnes
Potential electricity yield ~1.7 million TWh
Annual electricity consumption of the Netherlands ~120 TWh
Years of electricity in "waste" ~14,000 years

Fourteen thousand years. That is more than the entirety of recorded human civilisation. We call it "waste" and pay money to manage it, whilst it could power our country for millennia.

!Thorizon: Dutch technology that uses "waste" as fuel

The Dutch company Thorizon is developing a molten salt reactor specifically designed to use nuclear "waste" as fuel. This is not an academic thought experiment:

  • Thorizon received €10 million from the French government.
  • The company signed a cooperation agreement with EDF, Europe's largest energy producer.
  • The reactor is designed to burn transuranic elements from spent fuel — precisely the material that anti-nuclear organisations call "unmanageable waste".

This is happening now. In the Netherlands. By Dutch engineers.

!The BN-800: proof that it works

Anyone who claims that using nuclear waste as fuel is "a pipe dream" is ignoring reality. The Russian BN-800 fast breeder reactor at Beloyarsk has been operational since 2015. It runs on MOX fuel — made from plutonium extracted from reprocessed spent fuel.

Reactor Type Capacity Operational since
BN-800 (Russia) Sodium-cooled fast reactor 880 MWe 2015
BREST-OD-300 (Russia) Lead-cooled fast reactor 300 MWe Expected ~2027
CEFR (China) Experimental fast reactor 20 MWe 2011
Phénix (France) Sodium-cooled fast reactor 233 MWe 1973-2009

The technology exists. It is proven. It is running. The only thing missing is political will.

The closed fuel cycle eliminates long-lived waste

With a closed fuel cycle — reprocessing of spent fuel followed by "burning up" in fast reactors (not combustion in the chemical sense, but fission of the remaining heavy elements) — the waste problem changes fundamentally:

Scenario Waste requiring long-term storage Required storage duration
Open cycle (current approach) Spent fuel rods (actinides + fission products) 100,000-300,000 years
Closed cycle (reprocessing + fast reactors) Fission products only (4%) 300-500 years

The difference is not marginal. It is the difference between a problem that lasts longer than human civilisation, and a problem that is shorter than the age of Notre-Dame.

!The waste nobody talks about: wind and solar

Whilst anti-nuclear organisations obsessively focus on the microscopically small volume of nuclear waste, they remain silent about the waste streams of their preferred solutions:

Waste stream Problem Half-life
Wind turbine blades 78% goes to landfill, not recyclable None. Remains forever.
Solar panels Contain cadmium, lead, selenium. Recycling rate: 10-12% None. Cadmium remains cadmium.
Neodymium magnets Toxic waste lake at Baotou, China (10-12 km²) None. Chemical waste does not decay.

The distinction that is consistently ignored: radioactive waste decays by definition. It becomes less dangerous over time, not more. Chemical waste has no half-life. Lead remains lead. Cadmium remains cadmium. Arsenic remains arsenic. Forever.

Nuclear waste is the only industrial waste in the world that spontaneously becomes less dangerous.

Conclusion

What we call "nuclear waste" is 99% unused fuel. Of the material that comes out of a reactor, 96% is directly reusable. The remaining 4% — the actual fission products — decay within a few hundred years to the level of the original ore.

At COVRA in Zeeland, 200,000 tonnes of depleted uranium are stored: enough energy for 14,000 years of Dutch electricity supply. The Dutch company Thorizon is building a reactor that uses this "waste" as fuel, with support from the French government and EDF. The Russian BN-800 has proven since 2015 that the technology works.

Meanwhile, the supposedly "clean" renewables sector produces waste streams that are many times larger, contain toxic heavy metals, are barely recycled, and — unlike radioactive waste — never decay.

Anyone who calls nuclear waste an "unsolvable problem" is confusing a political taboo with a technical fact. The problem is solvable. Indeed: it is not a problem. It is a fuel.

Sources

  1. Moormann, R. (2021), Atommüll: ungelöstes, unlösbares Problem? (link)
  2. WePlanet (2024), What a Waste — The energy content locked in nuclear 'waste' (link)
  3. Thorizon, company information and EDF partnership announcement (2025) (link)
  4. IAEA, Fast Reactor Database (link)
  5. CEA France, La Hague reprocessing facility — operational data
  6. COVRA, annual report and depleted uranium inventory data (link)
  7. Liu, P. & Barlow, C.Y. (2017), "Wind turbine blade waste in 2050," Waste Management (link)
  8. IEA-PVPS (2022), End-of-Life Management of Photovoltaic Panels (link)