Dounreay does not have the means of reprocessing the breeder material and the process of immobilising and disposing of it in Caithness would cost about £65m, the NDA has reported.
The spent fuels are recycled in both the Consolidated Fuel Treatment Center and the Actinide Management Island, which are capable of reprocessing spent fuels by Uranium Extraction and Pyrochemical processes, respectively.
Design of reprocessing facilities, either based on conventional plutonium uranium reduction extraction (PUREX) or advanced PUREX processes, is primarily a nuclear process engineering discipline.
But lingering safety concerns slowed the adoption of reprocessing.
It was not encouraging to advocates of reprocessing.
Some commercial reprocessing plants were built or planned, but by the mid-1970s the cost of reprocessing had escalated to a point where its economics became questionable.
Investors will have to shoulder some of the costs of reprocessing paperwork.
A byproduct of reprocessing, though, is plutonium, which is what you need for a nuclear weapon.
As SpaceX puts it: "The Space Shuttle was technically reusable, but its giant fuel tank was discarded after each launch, and its side boosters parachuted into corrosive salt water every flight, beginning a long and involved process of retrieval and reprocessing.
Content-based splitting minimizes number of reprocessed partitions.
