Once the rods had been exhausted for their original purpose, the spent fuel could be reprocessed into plutonium in sufficient quantities to make nuclear weapons.
When nuclear plants were designed, says Wald, regulators anticipated that spent fuel rods would sit in cooling water pools for five years and then be chemically processed and turned into plutonium.
They switched to military fire engines to douse the reactors and the pools of spent fuel rods beside them.
India has since designated some of its reactors as civilian, and open to inspection, but others still churn out spent fuel richly laden with weapons-usable plutonium.
We also need to cool the reactor and the spent fuel in the spent fuel pool but that basically means you wanna maintain the coolant inventory which means water in the primary system.
Of greatest concern are the spent fuel rods stored at reactor Nos. 3 and 4. They are not contained in the same kind of vessel as active fuel rods.
Regulators here may need to expedite the removal of some spent fuel from pools to dry storage in casks.
Whether or not spent fuel is recycled, there ultimately is the problem of how to dispose permanently of high level radioactive wastes.
The pact would guarantee unhindered supply of uranium for Indian reactors and the right to reprocess spent fuel, PTI quoted unnamed officials as saying.
All the more important, then, to keep a close eye on plants that produce quantities of such dangerous materials-especially where uranium is enriched and plutonium is extracted from spent fuel.
Instead, spent fuel rods in the U.S. are currently stored in underground pools of water or in dry-cask storage, where older fuel is put into steel cans filled with inert gas and then stored in silos.
The threat comes within days of Pyongyang saying it had begun reprocessing spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon nuclear plant.
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