“If we just get to the 95% of energy left over in spent uranium fuel, it would be easier to stop burning so many planet-heating fossil fuels. And using more of that energy would shorten the period the final waste product needed to decay back to the radiation levels of uranium mined from the Earth.
“We’re looking at ways to recycle used nuclear fuel because it reduces the amount of waste that has to be disposed of,” Hawthorne said in a conference room outside her lab one morning last October. “It also decreases the amount of time the waste has to be isolated for, from about 300,000 years to about 300 years.”
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