 This apple is delicious. It's fueling my body giving it the nutrients and energy it needs to keep me going. When I'm done with this apple, I can throw it in the garbage, or I can choose to throw it in the compost where it'll return to the ground and produce more apples with even more energy. Just like me, nuclear power plants need fuel to keep them running, but they use something a little more potent than apples. At Canadian nuclear laboratories, researchers and engineers are working on fabricating new types of nuclear fuels every day. A nuclear fuel is a material that produces heat through fission. Fission is a process where an atom is split apart, producing energy in a nuclear reaction. Can-do reactors produce all nuclear energy in Canada using deuterium oxide, also called heavy water, and natural uranium. The uranium is what fuels the reactor itself, compacted into pellets and placed into a fuel bundle. This is a nuclear fuel bundle that's used in a can-do reactor. This fuel bundle goes into a fuel channel in a nuclear reactor and the fuel bundle produces heat. This fuel pellet is incredibly energy dense. It has the same energy content as thousands of barrels of oil or tons of coal. The fuel inside a can-do reactor can last anywhere from one to two years before it's removed. The spent fuel has to be handled very carefully because it's hot and radioactive. When the used fuel is discharged from the reactor, it goes to spent fuel cooling bays which are filled with water. The water serves to cool the fuel after it's come out of the reactor because it's still quite hot. And it also serves as a radiation shield for the radiation coming off the used fuel. This spent fuel stays in the cooling bays for a minimum of ten years before heading to a dry storage facility where concrete is used to shield the leftover radiation from the rest of the environment. You can see that once this fuel bundle has been used, it doesn't go into the atmosphere. It's in solid form. This is what we have to deal with. You know, it's compact and it's small footprint. But what if we could choose compost recycling over the waste bin for spent nuclear fuels like we do with apple cores? How much energy is really left? Now what's really surprising is that once this fuel bundle is used, we haven't harvested more than 1% of the energy. So there's still 99% of the energy that's available to be harvested. Researchers and engineers are working to ensure that future technologies will allow us to use all of this energy. At Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, a fuel called natural uranium equivalent is being created using a blend of recycled and depleted uranium. Essentially, you're using the fuel twice. In 2010, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and Kandu Energy Inc. in partnership with Chinese nuclear researchers successfully placed natural uranium equivalent fuel in a Kandu reactor. In another recycling option, spent uranium and plutonium from nuclear reactors are mixed together to form what is called a mixed oxide fuel. After a nuclear fuel has been used in a reactor, plutonium is present in the used fuel. And this plutonium can be extracted from the used fuel and recycled into the nuclear fuel cycle in what we call mixed oxide fuel, which is a mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides. Developments in new and recycled nuclear fuels are an exciting way forward for the future where the three Rs are reduced, reused and recycled are really being taken to heart. We're hoping that, let's say in 200 years, we do have this technology and it would allow us to use that same fuel bundle and provide enough power for my great-grandkids and their children and their children's children. This is how powerful nuclear energy is.