Continued from this comment:
The uranium and/or plutonium fuel in each nuclear warhead degrades after about 9 years, and has to be replaced. That’s why we have a totally white elephant called ‘nuclear power’, which the markets won’t touch but the government totally subsidises because it needs a constant supply of fuel for all those nuclear warheads, to ‘keep us safe’.
Well it was like that (Magnox etc.) but I don’t think it is any more. Mostly, nuclear power just dwarfs weapons manufacture, making the weapons side seem insignificant – I suppose it give it cover. 180 warheads for Trident, you say? That’s only about a tonne of plutonium, isn’t it? I think there’s about 50 tonne under guard, last I heard at Sellotape. What’s the mass of the fuel in a typical Pressurised Water Reactor? The US has about half a million tonnes of depleted uranium, which implies the production of about fifty thousand tonnes of PWR fuel rods, which implies spent fuel in a similar sort of quantity. This will all need to be transmuted in something like AMSTER: