From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 08:46:55 MST
I think Mike may have said:
> To answer your question, the French use breeder reactors to cleanly
> dispose of their nuclear waste. We tried to build one here in the US,
> but the anti-nukers got it canned because if the nuclear waste problem
> was solved, they'd have to get real jobs.
I think much of this statment may be inaccurate.
My current records (I'll supply the spreadsheet for people who send
me offlist requests) suggest that the U.S. and Russian inventories
of Highly Enriched Uranium and Plutonium are respectively 645, 1050,
100 and 160 *TONS*.
There *isn't* a problem of "fuel" resources.
Furthermore, breeder reactors are designed to produce greater amounts
of fissionable material, *not* to dispose of nuclear waste. I strongly
suspect that the breeder reactor programs in the U.S. got terminated
because the military concluded funding the production of more fuel when
it already had enough for 74000+ nuclear weapons seemed just a
*little* bit unnecessary. (There are some technical details
with respect to turning fuel for nuclear weapons into fuel
for nuclear reactors but these are well understood technical
issues that can be resolved.)
Living in the state of Washington, where the Hanford facility
and the waste on its premisese is a frequent source of news
I can express with reasonable certainty -- if a breeder reactor
could dispose of nuclear waste -- we would have one operating
in this state.
The French have (largely) solved the problem of a standardized
reactor design, well trained people who can operate those
reactors and fuel for those reactors.
The French have not solved (to my knowledge) the issues
of the decommissioning of those reactors or the safe
long term storage of the radioactive materials that
result from the operation of nuclear reactors. This issue
is what has produced the intense Yucca Mountain debate
in the U.S.
The production of non-radioactive isotopes from the radioactive
isotopes produced by nuclear activities is currently a research
activity by Los Alamos National Laboratory and in addition some
European labs (I believe). I believe I have mentioned this on
this list before. The technology anticipated for these activities
is accelerator technology (presumably to impact the radioactive
isotopes with neutrons or protons to transform them into non-radioactive
isotopes and is not "breeder reactor" technology. (I suppose one
could loosely consider this breeder reactor technology but it is
very much separated from the historical breeder reactor technology
designed to produce greater quantities of fissionable materials.)
Since I feel that I'm about to shift into "rant" mode
I'll terminate this message now. A following message
may include some commentary related to this topic if
I get it past my self-censors.
Robert
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