It's just yet another example of how the nuclear industry tries to spin its activies as safe and harmless. They probably spend as much money on PR these days as they do on R & D.
The IEAA says so -> https://www.iaea.org/publications/10959/high-burnup-fuel-imp...
Nuclear physics says so -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process
The term gets used in rocketry, and not all rockets use combustion (doing a burn with a cold gas thruster)
Hey, might as well get into CD's -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_disc_authoring
Why is it that the entire industry uses the term just fine, but not you? Because you're wrong.
Now, the fission fragments are highly radioactive and unstable isotopes of lighter elements. These fragments undergo beta and gamma decay, emitting high-energy particles and photons, transforming into stable isotopes over time. Furthermore, some neutrons, instead of inducing fission in uranium-235, are absorbed by uranium-238 nuclei, typically actinides, like plutonium and neptunium.
So this ridiculously toxic brew of rather random radioactive heavy elements is what we call a 'spent fuel rod'. If you were to pack a few kilos of high explosive around one of these 'spent' fuel rods and detonate it in a city center, it would probably cost at least a billion dollars to clean up, if that.
It sounds kind of ridiculous when you can build 1 GW of reliable 24/7 wind/solar/storage power generation for the same cost as a 1 GW nuclear power plant, and then you never have to buy fuel or deal with the waste stream ever, doesn't it?
Using spent nuclear fuel as a terror weapon would be vastly less deadly than more conventional means. Think about the immense effort of planning and manpower to steal nuclear waste, weaponize it, and then deliver that weapon to a population center. Now think about all that planning and manpower going towards a more conventional attack, like flying a plane into a building or detonating a normal explosive bomb.
Nuclear waste can be deadly, but it's a slow killer. We regularly test our water supply for uranium not out of any fear of a dirty bomb, but because naturally occurring uranium is common enough that it's a problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC359425/
In short, fears over nuclear waste are incredibly contrived.
... and if properly distributed, is enough to kill every human being on the planet.
Which proves the ridiculousness of such comparisons, i.e. enough bullets were produced in World War Two to wipe out the global human population too.
Stars "burn" their fuel. This usage is deeply precedented in astrophysics.
Storage remains a big barrier to wide-scale deployment of intermittent power sources in a manner truly independent of a fossil fuel grid. While costs may be dropping, scale and competition with electric vehicles means grid storage isn't growing all that quickly. Many solar plants that are employing storage are only installing 2-4 hours worth of storage, which isn't sufficient to even out the duck curve let alone seasonal variations. Wind also has big swings in seasonal production. Even with significant overproduction, most grids are still looking at several days worth of storage to account for a string a cloudy or less-windy days.
Another factor is that wind and solar have significantly different output depending on geography and weather. Nuclear's only geographic requirement is a source of water for cooling - and that doesn't have to be potable water, it can be salt water or wastewater. And since human beings need water, too, this is rarely an impediment to deploying nuclear power plants near the population centers that use the most power. By contrast, wind and solar often need to be produced hundreds of miles away from population centers. This tends to overload the transmission capacity of rural power infrastructure [1], sometimes halting wind and solar projects.
1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...