To this end waste needs to be reprocessed in a manner that:

• Separates off actinoids that can be used both as fuel for some reactors and as masking that would make inextricable those isotopes of Uranium (235) and Plutonium (239) of interest to terrorist bomb makers. If the generating reactor is such, then the actinoid portion would be kept for consumption on site.

• Seals the fission products that remain to reduce the accidental, seismic and terrorist threats upon their transit and storage.

I recommend a mobile processing laboratory that could spare the expense of building such at each nuclear site. Its components would be hauled from plant to plant where they could be assembled and later disassembled. Several full vehicle loads may be joined into one substantial, functioning component; or one or more components, carried in a single vehicle.

Currently the United Kingdom, France, Japan and Russia reprocess their spent fuel, but 28 years ago the United States, concerned about the reprocessing byproduct, weapons grade Plutonium, as well as the proliferation of that technology, prohibited such procedures.

This prohibition should be reconsidered in light of recent developments and unfortunately recent proliferations. The proposed Integral Fast Reactors could feed upon its own actinoid cocktail as well as those processed at other sites. These cocktails would be of interest to terrorists as bases for radiological (not nuclear weaponry), but this is not really different from the current threat to nuclear, power-plant fuel.

By doing all of this on site, radioactive waste transiting the nation’s communities towards Yucca Mountain would be in smaller amounts and by greater fail safety. It would head out having been rendered so as to offer those communities through which it were to pass our best effort. Perhaps at some not so distant time, human ingenuity will have foreshortened the stays of strontium-90 and other fission waste at Yucca Mountain.