system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Can nuclear waste be recycled?

I know the jist of what nuclear waste is I just want to know if its possible to recycle it and if so (optional) why it isnt being done and if there are any benefits besides the obvious which is it being good for the enviroment.
gpt
Sure. ~96% of the mass of spent nuclear fuel is still the same uranium that was put into the reactor (though more depleted of ^(235)U, and some ^(236)U). Another ~1% is perfectly usable (as fuel) plutonium.

And there's plenty of other useful things in there. Isotopes with uses in nuclear medicine, even (non-radioactive) valuable metals (such as the "fission platinoids" - ruthenium, rhodium, palladium - and silver).

As for why it's not commonly done, the reprocessing "industry" (if you could call it that) was killed by presidential order, citing "proliferation concerns" (as if someone is going to break into a reprocessing plant on US soil, smuggle out the isotopes useful for making weapons, go through the rigamarole of enriching those isotopes so they can make one that won't fizzle, so on and so forth). That presidential order has been lifted, but since it was put into place in the first place, it's generally considered too risky to be commercially viable.

France, on the other hand, being the heavily nuclear country it is, *does* reprocess their spent fuel (among many other intelligent decisions in designing a nuclear industry). So do China, Russia, India, the UK, and Pakistan.