Recycling the “Wastes” of Fission

Extracts from Essay obtained from Energy From Thorium blog

• Fission processes inevitably generate a variety of fission product elements and a large number of isotopes, most of which are neutron-rich and radioactive.
• When all of the isotopes of an element reach stability it can logically be asked whether or not they are worth chemical extraction and recycling to other, non-nuclear uses.
• Xenon has a variety of isotopes but the longest lived one (133) has only a half-life of 5.2 days. Therefore, proceeding on the rule-of-thumb that “ten half-lives and you’re gone” after 50 days of storage the xenon remaining from fission would be essentially non-radioactive
• Since xenon is a valuable gas, rather than vent the xenon to the atmosphere it can be separated from the krypton by cryogenic distillation and sold. NASA and commercial satellite operators, for instance, use xenon for ion engines for spacecraft.
• Another valuable material from fission is neodymium.  one of the markets that is in greatest demand for neodymium is the wind turbine market.
• Neodymium is the third-most-common element generated from fission (by mass) and also achieves nuclear stability relatively quickly; its longest-lived isotope (147) has a half-life of 10.9 days. 
• But there are other isotopes in the “waste” stream of a fluoride reactor where the radioactive form of the isotope is the desirable and economic product. An example of this case is the life-saving medical isotope molybdenum-99
• In a fluoride reactor, on the other hand, the fluid nature of the reactor makes it possible to continuously extract Mo-99 along with the other isotopes of molybdenum.
• Xenon, molybdenum, and neodymium are three of the most common fission products but many others have value too. The fluid nature of the fluoride reactor makes RECYCLING of the so-called waste quite likely to be economically attractive in many circumstances.

What's not to like about the LFTR?  Even much of the waste can be used.

Update:

quote:

One of the basic principles of the modern environmental movement is the simple mantra to “reduce, reuse, and recycle”.

Sorensen shows how to reduce waste:

1 gigwatt year of electricity can be obtained from 1 ton of thorium as opposed to 300 tons of uranium

The graphic belows shows how thorium is reused continually to breed uranium 233.  All of the thorium is breeded into uranium 233, which is in contrast with naturally mined uranium, which can only fission a tiny portion.

Nothing is wasted, all of the thorium gets converted to uranium, which in turn, gets fully burned.

The recycle part of the question was mentioned above.  So, there you have it.  There's nothing not to like.

Update:

Every time I look around, I find something amazing about this LFTR concept.  For example, I already knew that a golf ball size chunk of thorium will produce enough energy for a lifetime-- I knew that.  But what knocked me out was something I saw on this video- the waste produced from this golf ball sized thorium will be the size of a rice grain!  Put that one in you Funk and Wagnalls!  ( old laugh in joke)