UK Can Run Power Grid for 500 Years On Waste Plutonium Stores

The main obstruction to the development of cheaper, safer, more reliable nuclear reactors, appears to be atrocious government policy-making. So far, no one has developed a cure for that hazard to humanity.
The UK is going through a difficult, schizoid stage of energy policy planning. On the one hand, the UK government wants to prove how green it is by deploying ruinously expensive arrays of intermittent unreliable forms of energy such as big wind and big solar. On the other hand, the government truly does want to develop at least one form of low-carbon energy that actually works -- for that, it is looking at nuclear power, as Fred Pearce writes:

While most of the world's civilian plutonium waste is still trapped inside highly radioactive spent fuel, much of that British plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder. It has been extracted from spent fuel with the intention of using it to power an earlier generation of fast reactors that were never built. This makes it much more vulnerable to theft and use in nuclear weapons than plutonium still held inside spent fuel, as most of the U.S. stockpile is.

Read more: http://thegwpf.org/uk-news/6344-uk-can-run-power-grid-for-500-years-on-waste-plutonium-stores.html