You need more than a new reprocessing plant to significantly extend uranium supplies, you also need a new kind of reactor.

The Light Water Reactor (currently in use worldwide) produces a small amount of Plutonium while it operates. With reprocessing of both the U235 and Pu in Uranium fuel, you can get 30% more energy per pound. That's nice, but it's nothing like a fast reactor which can produce more Plutonium than it consumes... With fast reactors, it's possible to burn not only U235, but U238, which gives the 60x fold increase in energy mentioned in the articles.

Note that the nuclear waste that we've currently got cooling in dry cast storage is mostly U238 with a little Pu and U235 in it. Reprocessed, the current stock of spent fuel in the U.S. could power the country for at least a century before we'd need to start mining Uranium again.

Yes, the technology isn't mature, but the price is enormous -- essentially unlimited energy, since uranium can be extracted from seawater at a reasonable price if we can burn the U238.

The complete lack of any details may fly on Chinese Central Television and Reuters.com, but I want more when I come to hacker news. What's next? "North Korea boasts development of time machine!"

"the re-use of irradiated fuel and is able to boost the usage rate of uranium materials at nuclear plants by 60 folds."

Say again? That means you use more uranium...

> "With the new technology, China's existing detected uranium resources can be used for 3,000 years,"

Another failure to consider that energy demands grow pretty much exponentially.