Indonesia's new president, Joko Widodo, is showing the way by chopping fuel subsidies and using the space this frees up in the budget to roll out cash handouts.Next, governments must decide what to give, and how.
Reprocessing spent fuel requires chopping up radioactive fuel rods by remote control and dissolving them in concentrated nitric acid, from which plutonium is precipitated out by complex chemical means.
Pyroprocessing was tested at the Argonne National Laboratory's Idaho test station, where researchers chopped up used fuel and ran electric currents through the mixture.
But those two countries, along with Britain and Germany, have their old fuel chopped up and dissolved in acid, so they can recover the unused uranium, and the plutonium that was produced in their reactors, for reuse as reactor fuel.
Almost every tree was chopped down for fuel in the harsh winters, and the only things that kept the nation alive were two small bridges, built by Heydar Aliev, a Nakhchivani and former Soviet strongman who led the region until he became the leader of all Azerbaijan in 1993, linking Nakhchivan to Turkey and Iran.
The Philips stove burns biomass and requires minimal fuel processing – fuel must be chopped into pieces less than approximately 2.5 cm in diameter and 5 cm long.
Some nuclear industry experts have been hoping for a stronger commitment to recycling, in which the fuel is chopped up and the plutonium that was created during reactor operations is scavenged and purified for use in new fuel.
It already has a reprocessing plant, where old fuel is chopped up, dissolved in acid, and then sorted, with its plutonium being removed, and the uranium sorted out for possible re-use.
The native forests, which had suffered sporadic felling for centuries, were almost annihilated during the Japanese occupation in the early 1940s, when most of the remaining trees were chopped down for cooking fuel.
