700 Years

clipped from www.examiner.com Thermal reactors use expensive fuel like uranium -- often mined at great cost from unstable countries which puts us in a similar bind as foreign oil -- and produce nuclear waste which remains dangerous for thousands of years. Storage of that waste is either expensive, temporary, or haphazard depending on the nation in question. Fast reactors could power this country for decades using that same waste as fuel. Fast reactors also happen to be about 100 times more efficient in converting that radioactive mass into electrical energy than thermal reactors, meaning they use relatively less fuel over time. Moreover, the waste from some types of fast reactors decays safely away in a matter of decades, making storage a far less worrisome and way less expensive proposition. And if we include the depleted uranium (DU) left over from the enrichment process, it would be something like 700 years before any more mining would be needed, once the current “thermal” types of reactors have been phased out.