Re: CANDU reactor questions

Thank you to everyone who answered. It sounds like:

1) There is no point in trying to get anything else out of spent CANDU
fuel.

2) While CANDU reactors make better use of U-235 than the American fuel
cycle does, it sounds like, unless they are being fed recovered
plutonium from elsewhere (such as dismantled nuclear weapons) they
are essentially limited by the amount of U-235 available, which we
can't really afford to think of as inexhaustable.

A couple more quesitons:

1) This business about "burning" "higher actinides"--do they mean
getting useful energy by *fissioning* assorted stray synthetic
elements that turn up in reactor waste? I thought that designing
a self-sustaining reaction around the "good stuff" like U-235,
Pu-239, or Th-233 was hard enough, and that most of those other
by-products like Am-241 just hurt a fission reaction. How does
one "burn" "higher actinides" at a net energy profit?

2) Supposedly you can load a CANDU-variant with Thorium-233 and
someone else's waste Plutonium, and get a self-sustaining
reaction. Once you start doing that, can you keep it going
with Thorium, or do you need a continuous supply of someone
else's Plutonium? (I use the phrase "someone else" because,
as discussed earlier, a nation using primarily CANDU's won't
have enough waste Plutonium to be worth extracting.)

The general direction of my questioning is this: The American way of
using U-235 is wasteful. The French breed their own Plutonium,
which makes a lot more sense, but I get the impression that breeder
reactors are a pain in the ass, and produce a lot of energy that
can't be captured and used for some reason. I was wondering if CANDU's
could be a lazier approach to making fuller use of Earth's fissionables.

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