The U.S. Energy Department is promoting far-out waste-recycling technologies requiring new reactor designs. But updated conventional designs like GE's "economic simplified boiling-water reactor" (shown here) are ready today. (Credit: Bryan Christie)

Imagine a nuclear industry that can power America for decades using its own radioactive garbage, burning up the parts of today's reactor wastes that are the hardest to dispose of. Add technology that takes nuclear chaff, uranium that was mined and processed but was mostly unusable, and converts it to still more fuel. Then add a global business model that makes it much less likely that reactor by-products such as plutonium will find their way into nuclear weapons in countries like Iran, even as economical nuclear-power technology becomes available to the whole world.

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