LA HAGUE, on France's Normandy coast, hosts a large complex that reprocesses spent fuel from nuclear power plants, extracting its plutonium for fabrication into new fuel. The U.S. Department of Energy has recently proposed building a similar facility.
Image: Martin Bond: Photo Researchers, Inc.
In Brief
- Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium, which can be extracted and used in new fuel.
- To reduce the amount of long-lived radioactive waste, the U.S. Department of Energy has proposed reprocessing spent fuel in this way and then “burning” the plutonium in special reactors.
- But reprocessing is very expensive. Also, spent fuel emits lethal radiation, whereas separated plutonium can be handled easily. So reprocessing invites the possibility that terrorists might steal plutonium and construct an atom bomb.
- The author argues against reprocessing and for storing the waste in casks until an underground repository is ready.
More In This Article
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Sidebar
A Nuclear Power Renaissance?
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Infographic
Nuclear Waste: A Growing Problem
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Infographic
Fuel Handing Options
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Infographic
Major Danger: Mass Destruction for the Masses
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Infographic
Waste Storage Solutions: Dry Casks
Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. What more could the moribund nuclear power industry possibly want?
Just one thing: a place to ship its used reactor fuel. Indeed, the lack of a disposal site remains a dark cloud hanging over the entire enterprise. The projected opening of a federal waste storage repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada (now anticipated for 2017 at the earliest) has already slipped by two decades, and the cooling pools holding spent fuel at the nation’s nuclear power plants are running out of space.
This article was originally published with the title Nuclear Fuel Recycling.
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28 Comments
Add CommentGrasping my reasons for rejecting nuclear fuel reprocessing requires nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle and a dollop of common sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the waste products are still producing heat, why not set up some kind of engine (like a Stirling engine) to generate power from this heat? Who cares if the efficiency is low, if nothing else, it would help to pay for the waste storage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWill the eco-hippies stop at nothing to torpedo any real solutions to the energy dependence problem?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"More trouble than it's worth?"
Is plunging the entire country into the dark whenever the sun stops shining (i.e. night time) or the wind stops blowing worth the "clear conscience" that leftists tell us solar / wind technology will bring?
According to this article it seems that nuclear waste generates significant amounts of energy for very long periods of time. It states that 10 tons of waste generates 10 kilowatts of heat. Rather than burying this waste at Yucca mountain, why not use this waste to generate more energy. If you collected all of the nuclear waste that has been produced in the U.S. and put it in a pool of water at such a density that the heat generated by the waste caused the water to boil, you could use the steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity. You could use a closed system so that the steam was condensed back into water and went back into the pool, thus avoiding the danger of radioactive steam leaking out into the environment. That way you could have a source of power for thousands of years until the nuclear waste degraded, and you wouldn’t need to worry about disposing of the waste because it was doing something useful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this> You could use a closed system so that the steam was condensed back into water and went back into the pool, thus avoiding the danger of radioactive steam leaking out into the environment. ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAhem. You have just designed a nuclear reactor that uses low quality fuel. :-)
You sitll have the problems of transmutation of elements in the reactor machinery causing failures due to neutron bombardments. And piping and such won't last thousands of years.
Aside from that, I think the article is ridiculous. Reprocessing works, and the reason France and Japan do it is that it is a cost effective solution. Enriching uranium is expensive and hazardous also.
And all the uranium waste in the world pales by comparison with the radioactives spewed from coal ash every year. I posted that elsewhere, showing the calculation that 3 - 5 times (conservatively) the amount of uranium mined every year globally is put into the atmosphere as coal ash each year.
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Edited by John_Toradze at 04/28/2008 7:28 PM
This could all be avoided by the use of a method known as Remix & Return. With this method the waste is blended with uranium ore mining waste until it is down to its original radioactivity level. In this form the waste could be buried without restriction and avoid the whole need for the Yucca facility.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThree major problems with the article:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) it describes the 1960's vintage Purex recycling rather than the more modern IFR recycling. Unlike purex, IFR only partially separates the plutonium, so it is not bomb-ready, and it's still highly radioactive.
2) Unlike once-thru reactor cycles, breeder cycles have an almost in-exhaustible energy source. They are 100 times more fuel efficient. This makes them appealing in the long term.
3) Any discussion of the cost of reprocessing should include the apparent low-price leader: the 2 fluid molten salt breeder reactor running on thorium. This is the forgotten ugly stepchild of the reactor industry, but it has very simple reprocessing.
All this over exhuming some ancient technology. Frankenstein in a tuxedo is still Frankenstein! R.I.P.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCANDU reactors can use other reactors' spent fuel directly, 'direct use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU' (DUPIC). A lot of 'waste' material can be utilized, you just need a heavy water reactor like Canada has.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI felt that the article was pretty weak. The main points it made - that waste reprocessing/recycling is a bad idea because of nuclear terrorism & the great expense - are political policy issues, not scientific or manufacturing obstacles, & can both be resolved by an appropriate commitment of security & funding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, the article seems to have totally disregarded the statements from the Sci Am December '05 article which states that reprocessing would result in a 95% reduction in half-life of nuclear waste.
I, too, have concerns & apprehensions about nuclear power, but a sensible discussion of it's appropriate place in our society is not advanced by political propaganda masquerading as scientific research.
I think what may anger people on the article is that is offers little hope.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso anytime you have to use "terrorists" as a point you've change the conversation from logic to fear.
Let me disagree with the article by first agreeing with it. REprocessing waste is not a good long term investment. However there are many novel ways to process the waste.
Yucca mountain as a solution is mentioned in passing in the article. I highly doubt the author belives in the "million of years" solution of a Yucca with barely processed waste. It does quite literally become a plutonium mine in 100 years. After that it just keeps becoming a better plutonium mine.
There are several forms of processing possible. It is a question of how much processing you can afford and what the preferred end state is. A few neat examples include "Photoremediation", "Plasma arc gasification".
Going back to the author's point. In the very near term (the current USA goverment adminisration) I agree stick the waste in dry casks and wait.
In the near term (next 4 to 8 years).
Understand this:
The most prevelant exisitng nuclear plants are only a small variation of the process to make bombs. The intial design (aka cycle) was optimized to make bombs. It was not optimized to make energy or run without difficult waster products.
1) Getting better at waste processing. If you get really good at processing I might let you put the RE back in. But I doubt it. The current reactors produce alot of junk.
2) Get better a better nucler design (cycle). Some of the knowledge to come out of better waste processing can also deliver a better cycle. But don't leave out the people that just want to start with different inputs to get less of a waste problem.
In the mid-term (8+ years): Schedule the old reactors to go away. Provided a good replacement is found. Plan on when that "millions of years" of a problem will be reduces to "thousands of years" of a problem or better.
Long term (30+ years). By this point you should not have delivered this mess to the next generation that the previous generation has dumped on us. Although I will cut the previous generation some slack in that 3-mile island event pretty much ended the discussion on what to do about clean up.
The author has been so invloved is talking the world out of the REprocessing mistake (which the world needed to be told that, read his other works) that he lacks the energy to dash a little hope in on the end. Hope is cheap, it doesn't take near as much research. Now talking someone out of doing something that only provide a short term solution (making MOX) that takes some work.
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Edited by iconoclasm at 04/29/2008 1:14 PM
I read the subject article by Dr. Frank von Hippel with interest and wanted to respond with this letter to convey my personal thoughts on the subject and to solicit interested reader comments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. von Hippels article delineated the processes, horrendous costs, and pitfalls associated with growing problem of nuclear fuel waste, the costs of these processes and storage, and dangers of a black market for fissionable materials. Dr. Hippel has pointed out the reprocessing spent nuclear materials costs more than the new material is worth and separated Plutonium is more dangerous and more readily available. As pointed out in the article, Russia and the UK are storing separated Plutonium, all 120 TONS, enough for 15,000 atom bombs. This does not include the growing stockpiles in other countries, including the US.
I would like to discuss my own personal out of the box approach for the growing problem of nuclear wastes, elimination of fissionable materials and nuclear weapons, and destruction of hazardous chemical and biological materials. Several years ago I have shared these ideas with the Pentagon and received a typical bureaucratic response, but with a growing problem and a changed political climate, I thought an additional try may be worthwhile.
Firstly as background information: The Nevada Test Site (NTS), located 65 miles north of Las Vegas, NV comprises 1,350 square miles of uninhabited desert and mountains. It contains the infamous Area 51 Secret Test Facility, Jackass and Mercury nuclear weapons test sites, Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Complex and the Yucca Flats test site used primarily for underground testing.
This entire area contains no human habitants (other than employees and test personnel), towns, villages, and never will, so it is an ideal place for conducting the tests and nuclear waste storage. It is very remote and has significant security systems in place to guard and control entry or access.
During the period from 1951-1992, 828 underground nuclear tests were conducted at the NTS, of which 62 of these tests included multiple detonations, adding 93 additional tests, for a total of 1021 tests, with 921 of them underground. The underground tests were primarily conducted in deep drilled holes or tunnels usually between 200 800 meters below the surface and several meters wide.
The weapon was placed in the test hole, which was instrumented and back filled with sand, gravel, gypsum to contain the explosion, before the device was remotely detonated from the surface. The weapon vaporizes subterranean soil and rock around the explosion, crating an underground chamber filled with superheated gases and molten rock. The chamber is like the inside of a vase with wall thicknesses of vitrified glass, measured in meters. Sometimes, depending on the size of the weapon, the depth of the test hole and the surrounding materials, the chamber will collapse into itself creating a depression at the surface. After a period of time the holes can be reopened for inspection, and could be reused if necessary.
My suggestion is to use any of the 1021 test chambers for vaporization of spent nuclear fuels from power plants, fissionable materials from weapons productions, and any other dangerous materials from Nuclear Recycling. Vaporization and elimination of these dangerous materials would be achieved by loading an existing or newly drilled chambers with the materials of concern and placing another nuclear weapon with them for detonation. The result would be the total elimination of the dangerous materials and another weapon from the inventory.
The same technique could be applied to chemical and biological weapons instead of trying to build unproven and dangerous and incredibly expensive incinerators above ground. Medical wastes that could be used to build dirty bombs could also be eliminated, all converted to primary matter and heat during the explosion.
This approach would eliminate the need to incur the exceedingly high costs sand undesirable aspects associated with recycling nuclear materials, which do not eliminate fissionable products like Plutonium, a nuclear weapons material. Rather it concentrates the material making it more difficult to store and easier to steal and fall into terrorist hands.
There are a few political and treaty considerations and agreements that would need to be addressed. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 has eliminated nuclear tests above ground, in the oceans or in space but did permit continued underground testing. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, signed by nuclear nations at the time (US, UK, USSR, France and China) precluded further underground tests. Non-signatories included India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea, all of whom either have or will have nuclear weapons. It is believed that both Israel and South Africa have nuclear weapons or capabilities.
I would suggest as an adjunct to this plan, the US, UK, France, consider diplomatic initiatives to purchase nuclear materials from other nations to reduce the likelihood of them falling into terrorists hands. Perhaps purchasing nuclear weapons from the Russians for detonation with the hazardous materials should be considered as well
With the estimated costs of hundreds of millions for storage and tens of billions for reprocessing, it make economic sense to consider an alternate approach for dealing with the growing problems of nuclear wastes.
Comments and further suggestions from interested readers welcomed and appreciated. Contact: gr82bretired@gmail.com. No Nuts or Whackos, please.
The proliferation issue can be dealt with through a technology known as "denaturing." By running a fuel cycle such that the spent fuel contains a few percent of the highly radioactive and lighter isotope Pu-238 with a relatively short half-life of 88 years, in addition to the heavier isotope Pu-240 which tends to cause Plutonium bombs to "fizzle," it becomes impractical to refine reprocessed Plutonium to "weapons grade," because any attempt to seperate Pu-239 from the heavier Pu-240 except impractical laser or mass-spec methods would concentrate the lighter "denaturing" isotope Pu-238 even more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn concentrations of more than about 10%, the decay heat of Pu-238 would cause refined Plutonium to spontaneously melt, making it essentially impossible to machine into a bomb core --- and long before 10% concentration, the decay heat would cause the conventional explosives that trigger the bomb to melt or even carbonize. Result: Denatured Plutonium cannot practically be used for bombs.
"Spent fuel can be safely stored at the reactor sites in dry casks".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy couldn't that have been the title? A lot of people seem to
think spent fuel is a hazard on par with carbon monoxide or dioxide.
Hippel says "the separated plutonium can readily serve" in bombs,
avoiding the passive voice by a whisker. The active voice --
"Bomb seekers could readily, but would not willingly,
use the separated plutonium" -- would have been more illuminating,
since all historical plutonium bomb seekers have found it easier,
safer, more secure, and -- due to the higher grade --
more satisfactory to make their own plutonium
by irradiating non-fuel uranium to low burnup.
With that in mind, we can see that storing separated spent-fuel Pu at a
reprocessing facility in a form that could readily be stolen would incur
the additional cost, if that theft were required to happen, of
compensating the thieves.
I agree that this article was low on facts as opposed to opinion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA major chapter in the history of advanced reactor design in the U.S. was overlooked. The EBR II was a reactor that was proven to be "passively" safe from melt-down, and was designed to recycle not only spent fuel but also old warheads in a fuel cycle that kept plutonium combined with other elements, thereby making it the ANSWER to security concerns instead of a problem.
There's a good summary of the EBR II at everything2.com. I've tried to attach the URL as a link, but that doesn't seem to be working so here's a cut and paste: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1038004
I would really like to hear from the author on why this was omitted from his analysis of the issue. Dr. von Hippel?
Sent 4/20/08
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo the Editor, Scientific American
Recycling Is Inevitable
Frank von Hippel would like "reprocessing" (he uses the term generically) to go away ["Rethinking Nuclear Fuel Recycling," May 2008], but it won't. The reality is that nuclear power is here to stay and grow, both globally and domestically. The world cannot long continue to use less than one percent of the energy in the uranium that is mined, discarding 99 percent as "waste," when recycling can turn those figures around.
Countries like China, India, Russia, and France realize that their burgeoning energy needs require expanded reliance on nuclear fission. They also are aware that the rapid depletion of low-cost uranium reserves will force them to go to advanced reactor types and associated recycling, thereby stretching their uranium resources more than a hundredfold.
Indigenous recycling plans are developing rapidly, and therein lies the danger. U.S. forbearance would be no help -- we are not a proliferation threat, because we already have far more nuclear weapons already than any rational defense policy would require. The biggest potential for the further proliferation of nuclear weapons lies in the unrestricted spread of weapons-related technology -- specifically, installations for enriching uranium and reprocessing spent fuel. And that is precisely the danger that the DOE's Global Nuclear Energy partnership (GNEP) addresses by proposing to limit such facilities to "supplier nations."
Von Hippel correctly observes that using MOX to cycle plutonium back into today's "thermal" reactors is expensive and does little good. It never would have been done if the reprocessing facilities had not been developed for military purposes. But recycling for advanced fast reactors is a different beast [see our piece in the December 2005 Scientific American].
He belabors the obvious. Of course it would be foolish to separate plutonium and then merely store it -- but nobody is proposing to do that. There is no reason to process the used fuel any faster than the extracted fast-reactor fuel can be used.
Some sixteen nations have signed onto GNEP so far. But without continued U.S. leadership, von Hippels wish will be granted and the GNEP will fade away. Coordination will be lost, and the technology for producing nuclear weapons materials will spread uncontrolled. Global security will be the loser.
William H. Hannum
Gerald E, Marsh
George S. Stanford
Reactor physicists,
retired from Argonne National Laboratory
Frank N. von Hippel's article hardly has merit for being published in a magazine that is supposed to be scientific in nature. This article is filled with the fear-mongering, "the terrorists are going to get us!" nonsense that has unfortunately permeated through nearly every aspect of daily life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisToday's nuclear energy policy in the US is based on the pressurized light water reactor (PWR) design. With water being a neutron moderator, it has breed ratios less than one, meaning this reactor "burns" the fissile uranium fuel. After a relatively small percentage of the fissile components have been used, the rest is considered waste when the reactor is refueled. Because these reactors operate at extremely high pressures in the primary coolant loop (which can fail with disasterous consequences), and they have a need to be shut down to be refueled and maintained as a consequence of their complex design, as well as the highly toxic fuel waste that they produce, future generations will undoubtedly look at these reactors as dangerous menaces. The very nature of "burning" a fresh fuel supply makes the PWR a consumer of uranium. If the author thinks that the continued behavior of consuming the planets uranium supply is without consequence, I invite him to research the story of humanity's unbridled consumption of hydrocarbon fuels. Even today, there is talk of rapid increase in uranium prices on the market due to the high consumption rate and difficulty in mining.
Newer generation reactors exist that resolve the issue of both being a net consumer of mined and refined uranium fuel, as well as the large amount of waste nuclear product. The sodium-cooled liquid metal fast neutron reactor (LMFR) design uses molten sodium at atmospheric pressure in the primary coolant loop. Since sodium does not slow down neutrons in the reactor core, the reactor makes plutonium as a product of the fission process, and which the author has made abundantly clear is the material needed for a nuclear weapon. However, this reactor design has several major benefits: 1) it makes more fuel than it burns, making the need to rely on limited planetary supplies of uranium unnecessary, 2) the reactor can address the huge issue of all of that nuclear waste that has a half-life of around 25,000 years by using it in the "jacket" of the core to make usable fuel, and 3) the amount of waste product created by this reactor design is extremely small relative to a PWR, and it only has a half-life of around 30-40 years. As an added benefit, LMFR's exhibit more passive safety features, meaning that with the unexpected loss of coolant pumping, the reactor will be able to continue circulating the sodium to prevent an overtemperature condition, as well as the lower pressure of the coolant loop making the reactor design much less costly.
Newer fuel processing methods have also been created that can address the proliferation concerns of a plutonium creating reactor. Pyroprocessing is a method of processing that can be done onsite at the facility (much better control of fuel processing from a security standpoint). This processing method creates highly radioactive fuel that is "impure" as it contains transuranic elements, making both the ability to use the fuel in a bomb impossible, and making it difficult to "smuggle" due to it's extreme radioactivity.
In closing, the publishing of this article is very narrow and one-sided, with an obvious goal of "scaring" the reader into thinking that no options exist in the nuclear power industry for decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, answering our need for more energy, and resolving the nagging issue of dealing with the toxic mess our current solutions leave us and our descendants for thousands of years to come. The author would have been much better received if he would open his mind to produce a more balanced and informed article.
In reading Frank Hippel's article about his staunch anti-reprocessing stance, I couldn't help but notice that there was quite a bit of presumption and generalization done on his part to obscure or marginalize the realities and economics of what drives nuclear power today, how safely and securely we handle special nuclear materials, and who actually has and continues to pay into the costs of handling spent nuclear fuel. While I am used to such disconnected idealism coming from the ivory towers of academia, I must say that I am disappointed that Scientific American chose to publish that single opinion piece while not asking those of us who actually work in nuclear energy to give some representation to another perspective on the topic of spent nuclear fuel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRegards,
Mike Strickland
Nuclear Reactor Engineer
This article had more political scare-mongering than appropriate for a scientific journal but more importantly was objectively wrong. Plutonium is not a "demon metal" but a well understood fuel. The fissionable isotopes 239 and 241 build up in only 3 months, which is why weapons production reactors are either shutdown and defueled after that time or the fuel is removed online after 3 months.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA normal PWR fuel cycle of 3 18month cycles builds up the non-fissle 240 and 242 isotopes. These make the plutonium useless for weapons because the spontaneous fissions emit so many neutrons that the metal will heat up before compression and "fizzle" as a low-yield detonation (pounds of TNT destroying the warhead, not tons of TNT destroying the target). Since all of the isotopes are chemically identical, the weapons-usable 239 and 241 cannot be seperated out with a trillion-dollar Manhatten project type installation.
I like the "denatured" term used in an earlier post, it captures the point that the only way to insure plutonium is never used in a weapon is to recycle it through many PWR fuel cycles. The reason terrorists have never, over 20 years of successful European recycling, even tried to hijack plutonium with 5 years of burn time in reactors is that even they are smart enough to figure out that it is useless for weapons. I have always expected Scientific American to verify the accuracy of a "problem" before publishing a article, but was disappointed this time.
It seems to me that Dr. Von Hipppel has done more damage to our Nations Long term Energy Security than almost anyone I can think of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGiven that he was instrumental in getting Carter/Gore to abandon the Fast Reactor -- he is not likely to change his mind about the use of Fast Reactors.
However, now that the U.S. Government (DOE, and Department of State) have concluded that since the rest of the world will move to reprocessing it is better for Stable Western Countries to provide fuel services to States that refrain from enrichment and reprocessing (see below by DOE) all he can do now is point to the high cost of previous FRs (Fast Reactors) reprocessing plants.
When one considers that technical advances can't be stopped and it only took 66 years (1903 to 1969) for man to go from his first power flight to landing on the moon it is not difficult to believe that competitive Advanced Fast Reactors and Simplified Advanced Reprocessing Systems will be developed in the next century. (See attached and the below statement from the DOE GNEP web site)
What von Hippel fails to understand (or doesn't want to discuss) is that the best place to put the Pu and other actinides extracted from spent LWR fuel is in startup cores for a new fleet of Advanced Sodium Cooled Reactors.
If one new Fast Reactor rated at 2280 MWe were built per year, within 25 years the total inventory of spent LWR fuel that will be produced by the present U.S. fleet of LWRs during their operating lifetime (86,000 tonnes) would be have been processed to create the necessary startup cores, the residual energy recovered, and the fission product waste conditioned for disposal.
This approach would postpone the time when an additional Yucca Mountain sized repository would be needed. Additionally the risk of proliferation would be reduced by replacing the need for additional LWR enrichment facilities with proliferation resistant dry pyroprocessing facilities where the spent and new fuel must be handled in heavily shielded and inerted hot cells and transfer casks at all times.
By utilizing depleted uranium, a byproduct of past and present enrichment operations, the nations energy reserves would be increased by a factor of 10 without the need for additional mining or the production of CO2.
Best regards,
Charles E. Boardman
Let the UK's useless, leak ridden reprocessing plant at Sellafield be a warning. It is good that there are some scientists not prepared to ask 'How high?' when the government asks them to jump in response to a policy change. Reprocessing just increases the stockpiles of nuclear waste - for which there is still NO safe way of disposal. Nuclear power is not the answer to climate change. It is the response of a government fearful of the loss of control of de-centralised energy systems - and anxious to make lots of money for its friends. We shouldn't be wasting any more brain power or resources on such a dangerous, short-sighted energy policy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is interesting to note that many pro-nuclear lobbyists insist on the inoffensive nature of radioactivity. So why is it that in the Civil Defence Corps we are issued with dosimeters and are exposed to limited fall-out radiation in the case of nuclear war? Nuclear war produces blast damage, but the remainder of the opulation must be protected from fallout radiation. The same is true for reactor meltdown accidents, such as Tchernobyl. Yet in Europe the populations were not mobilised to protect themselves. Politicians do not seem to be aware of the nature of the problems they are supposed to deal with. Nor does the population.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGrasping a rudimentary understanding of the nuclear power cycle prepares one to speak as an expert in that field! At least some of the commentators have real knowlage in the field. This is too important to be left to ignorant opinionizers bent on continuing road blocks to solving our base power generating needs, Light water reactor technolagy is nearly 50 years old and Russian design is even older. A modern fuel and reactor design is needed for the 21st century.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"imminent danger from nuclear weapons" and hundreds of billions in cost of fast breeder reactors? Can I just remind the distinguished author (who's much more of a politicaian than a scientist) of the cost of our recent decade long adventures in certain Middle Eastern location? Trillions, ain't it? And the benefit? Who has benefitted from this sabre-rattling? Clearly a vested interest nature of this article is shameful and cannot be judged even as an opinion but propaganda and fear prolifiration. Just count how many times the author uses the "terror" derivatives compared to solid science arguments of the fast breeder technology proponents. It is the rhetoric for news anchors of CNN and not those "with a dollop of common sense" :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrudimentary "terror" propagating arguments. Costly isn't the word compared to the MiddleEastern adventures. And even with the new messiah in the white house - the show goes on. It is for CNN news anchors with a "dollop of common sense" that such rhetoric might appeal. The distinguished political "scientist" is waisting our time here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"All this over exhuming some ancient technology. Frankenstein in a tuxedo is still Frankenstein! R.I.P."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree - windmills served their purpose in 16th century Holland, but are far too ugly and unreliable for use in a high-tech, power-on-demand society. Put them to bed, along with the other Fred Flintstone energy source, "burning carbon".
Excellent analysis Mr. Boardman. Thank you for your contribution of rationality to this discussion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wish a reputable hard-news organization would do a thorough expose of the Von Hipple/Hazel O'Leary decapitation of the Integral Fast Reactor project during the Clinton administration in 1994, and how they have set back our energy independence and carbon emmissions progress by several decades.
yes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this