أنشئ حسابًا أو سجّل الدخول للانضمام إلى مجتمعك المهني.
If nuclear wastes here are spent fuels, then the answer is Yes and it has been done. Although, based some opinions, is not economically possible.
The major drawback of current Light Water Reactors (LWR) is that they can only burn few percents of Uranium contained in the fuel. The fresh fuels contain around3-5% of Uranium while spent fuels still contain around1-2% of Uranium (along with other high level radioactive materials) which is higher than the concentration of Uranium in natural uranium before enriched (around0.7%).
Therefore some people think to recycled the LWR spent fuels by extracting remaining U- as well as Pu- and other long-lived actinides. This process of extracting those isotopes is sophisticated as the spent fuels emit high dose of radiation and produces other radioactive chemicals, thus it is costly. Another problem is, this process prone to be used illegally to produce nuclear weapons.
Countries like Japan and France prefer to recycle their nuclear spent fuels while US prefer to keep them inside the ultimate storage.
