Recycling Nuclear Fuel: France's Secret Energy Solution! #shorts

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]One day I stumbled upon a crazy fact that stopped me in my tracks. There is still over 90% of the energy left in the nuclear fuel rods when we throw them out. This is such a crazy number.

[00:00:13]Because we usually only use nuclear fuel for a couple of years and then it just sits around and stays radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

[00:00:22]The kicker is that actually up to 96% of spent nuclear fuel is recyclable.

[00:00:29]I wanted to find out why.

[00:00:30]And the best way to do that is a visit to the undisputed leader in nuclear recycling.

[00:00:36]France. So, that's where we're headed.

[00:00:44]We're going to the one and only nuclear recycling plant in the country operated by the company Orano. About 2/3 of its electricity comes from nuclear plants and all of the country's spent nuclear fuel gets transported here to be recycled.

[00:01:00]So, this is a transportation cask. The the complete cask weighs 110 tons. It's very heavy because we need to protect from radioactivity. We have one cask like this one per day.

[00:01:17]Step one is taking the fuel rods out of the transportation casks.

[00:01:21]The fuel rods are taken out in these completely sealed off chambers with remote controlled machinery.

[00:01:27]Then the rods are transported to the next [music] area where we get to step two, the cooling.

[00:01:34]So, you're very close to one of our storage pools.

[00:01:40]In the baskets, we have nuclear fuels.

[00:01:44]So, we have 4 m of water on top of the baskets to protect us.

[00:01:49]The rods spend 5 to 7 years in this pool until they have cooled down enough to be processed further. It It me that a lot of countries just use it for 4 or 5 years and then throw it away.

[00:02:00]Seems like such a waste. You can consider them as waste, but we don't consider them as waste. This is like a uranium and plutonium mine. Um 96% of what's in the pool can be recycled.

[00:02:16]So it's a huge amount of energy.

[00:02:19]So that's when the fuel lands here.

[00:02:21]The next [music] step is disassembly and separation. Behind this door we have the chemical process. The chemical process consists in separating uranium, plutonium, and fission products.

[00:02:34]First you separate the metal cladding from the fuel pellets. Then you put them into nitric acid to dissolve them.

[00:02:41]After that you put the solution together with a solvent that extracts [music] the uranium and plutonium, leaving the fission products behind.

[00:02:49]The fission products, which make up about 4% of [music] the waste, are not recyclable. This uranium can be used in regular nuclear power plants instead of mined uranium.