This is why
How about money? Let's start at the beginning. Do you know how much it would cost to create a facility big enough to reprocess spent fuel rods? The same complexities that makes cost skyrocket for nuclear power plants are identical for the reprocessing plants that have been attempted in the US and abroad. Once again, construction delays, cost overruns and the need for loan guarantees by the billions will be the order of the day, and in this case, the probable multinational corporate benefactor won't even be based in the United States. ARENA, the French reprocessor has been hard at work in the lobbying halls of congress to get the laws changed to open up the US market.
Then there is the actual reprocessing: not only does it create a huge amount of unusable waste in order to extract the re-usable fuel; in France, they don't even re-use it --they ship it to Russia, trading it for natural uranium that has been enriched. Why is this? Your guess is as good as mine, but the bottom line is that it is not re-used for good reasons. One thing is for certain: it's certainly going to be more expensive to go down this path than even just continuing to dry store the spent fuel rods, which I agree is not a good long term solution.
And then there's all of the plutonium. What are the French doing with it? Stockpiling it. For what? Originally, they were going to use it in fast breeder reactors, which has been abandoned primarily for economic reasons. Then they were going to put it back into new MOX fuel rods and this has not turned out well, either.
So what will we do with it in the US? No fast breeder reactors around to use it--unless we want to spend untold billions building one of those, and I don't think there is political will to do that. Store it, stockpile it? Fine. Add it to the military-level security that we're already spending to secure our existing nuclear liabilities. And who pays for that? You guessed it: yet another public subsidy--the taxpayer foots the bill.
If you take the actual amount of money spent on this incredibly expensive, complex and critical infrastructure needed to support the nuclear power industry, from cradle to glowing grave, and applied that same money to a system of decentralized power production across our country, we would be more secure, have a more stable power supply, have more real jobs, and have more individual and collective freedom.
But with our limited resources, we can't have both. The choice of which path to take seems very clear.
