There's No Fool Like An Old Fuel - Breeder Reactors

Taken from a verse in the Bible's Book of Job "The aged aren’t always wise, nor do the elderly always understand justice." Today, the foolish behavior of an older person (with education and wisdom) seems especially foolish as they are expected to think and act more sensibly than a younger one. For many decades, eastern Idaho’s Arco desert was known as an isolated, wide-open and windswept haven for sagebrush, antelope and rattlesnakes. All that changed with the construction of the National Reactor Testing Station, now known as the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. Since its creation, more than 50 nuclear reactors including the first Experimental Breeder Reactor or EBR-I—were designed and built at the Idaho site. What do we fission in today's reactors, and what are "Breeder Reactors"? In the previous 75 years America built some fantastic breeder reactors. The EBR-I represented a departure from weapons research. Argonne National Laboratory concentrated on developing peaceful uses of the atom, especially in nuclear power plants. Argonne-West was established in Idaho to test designs and theories developed at Argonne-East in Chicago. The nation’s first breeder reactor ushered in a new era in nuclear history when it became the first reactor to generate useable amounts of electricity from nuclear energy. It accomplished this feat on December 20, 1951 by lighting four light bulbs. What do we really know about the sources of radioactive material on our planet? Did you know that California’s geothermal plants in the Imperial Valley produce more radioactive waste than nuclear? Why didn't you hear that from the anti-nuclear coalition? I'd ask why and ask more questions about Fossil Fuels? Yes, they do release a lot of naturally occuring radioactive materials into the environment, but that all goes unmonitored and unreported to the public. I can't see the slightest distiction beteen natural and man-made radiation exposure when it comes to health. Safety concerns about the plants construction to be safe and accident-free hours of operation aside, it wouldn’t be fair to tell you how much the public normally gets exposed to one but not the other. Did you know that the estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities? At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants. While well-intentioned, the "Atoms for Peace" program was also criticized for facilitating nuclear proliferation by spreading dual use nuclear technology, i.e., technologies and materials, such as highly enriched uranium, used in early civilian nuclear programs that can also be used for the production of nuclear weapons. Some believe that Atoms for Peace set nuclear aspirants, like Iran, on the path to acquiring necessary technologies and materials for the development of a nuclear weapons program. In addition to helping nations like Iran start their own peaceful use for atomic energy, the “Atoms for Peace” project helped develop a second and more powerful breeder reactor. The EBR-II was a passively safe pool-type design that combined a metal alloy fuel. That is, the reactor could safely shut down, without operator assistance, even if safety systems had failed. This safety feature was not dependent on control rods or computer monitoring, but on the laws of physics. This reliance on natural physical properties is the ultimate backup safety system for a nuclear power plant. This would make nuclear incidents, such as those that occurred at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nearly impossible to duplicate. This was demonstrated in 1986, when EBR-II underwent a series of IFR safety tests. These tests simulated accidents involving loss of coolant flow. Even with the normal shutdown devices disabled, the reactor safely shut down without reaching excessive temperatures anywhere in the system. A dangerous design? No. The one we didn’t build was closer to my childhood home in Tennessee. The Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project was first authorized in 1970 during the Nixon administration initially conceived as a major step toward developing liquid-metal fast breeder reactor technology as a commercially viable electric power generation system in the United States. President Nixon established this technology as the nation’s highest priority research and development effort as a prototype and demonstration for a class of such reactors, called Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBR). However, the Clinch River project was controversial from the start, and economic and political considerations eventually led to its demise. President Carter, a consistent opponent of the Clinch River project explained his 1977 veto of a bill to authorize funding for the project continuation, it would be "large and unnecessarily expensive" and "when completed, would be technically obsolete and economically unsound." Congress persisted in keeping the Clinch River project alive over the President's objections, and Carter repeatedly chastised Congress for its actions. In a speech in 1979, after the House Science and Technology Committee had voted to proceed with the project over his opposition, he said "The Clinch River breeder reactor is a technological dinosaur.” Instead of investing public resources in the breeder demonstration project, Carter urged attention to improving the safety of existing nuclear technology. U.S. Congress terminated funding on October 26, 1983. Yes, I say that when you don’t like the science behind nuclear, it must be "unnecessary and wasteful". Nobody said it was dangerous. Why do anti-nuclear organizations say: "We don't need to invent anything new, we just need to stop wasting time with distractions like nuclear power." Science fact: A nuclear bond contains over 1 million times the energy of a hydrocarbon bond. That is the potential of atomic power. With better nuclear reactors we can realize that potential. Remember Carl Sagan’s Cosmos? His description of nuclear fission was introduced at the very basics. Electrons, Protons, Neutrons. Elements and Isotopes. Fissile material and Fertile material. “A pound of uranium, which is less than the volume of your fist, contains the energy equivalent of 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 200,000 gallons of gasoline. Uranium is a tremendously concentrated energy source, that's why you can make bombs out of 10 pounds of it, we only extract about one percent of that energy. With just a little bit of arithmetic, uranium could supply all the electricity in the United States for at least 300 years." If the world ever got out of the nuclear weapons production business, then using Thorium as a fuel would make perfect sense. What do you know about using Thorium as fuel? In the thorium cycle, thorium-232 breeds by converting first to protactinium-233, which then decays to uranium-233. If the protactinium remains in the reactor, small amounts of uranium-232 are also produced, which has the strong gamma emitter thallium-208 in its decay chain. Similar to uranium-fueled designs, the longer the fuel and fertile material remain in the reactor, the more of these undesirable elements build up. In the envisioned commercial thorium reactors, high levels of uranium-232 would be allowed to accumulate, leading to extremely high gamma-radiation doses from any uranium derived from thorium. These gamma rays complicate the safe handling of a weapon and the design of its electronics; this explains why uranium-233 has never been pursued for weapons beyond proof-of-concept demonstrations. Solve the nuclear waste problem by using the nuclear waste as fuel. Historically, most of the public is unaware. Some of the predictions of nuclear energy were true, others were changed in a way that made them acceptable of those more dangerous reactors that could also be used to keep the weapons grade plutonium cycle going for national security, and some were never developed at all. Global Warming is still going to be a problem for generations if we can’t find methods that control green-house gas emissions. Can you be an environmentalist and be 100% anti-nuclear? Before you say yes, have you seen Pandora’s promise, a documentary was created in favor of nuclear energy? In "Pandora's Promise", the voice is that of Stewart Brand, the Whole earth catalog, a longtime environmentalist and entrepreneur who's become a supporter of nuclear power as a way to cut coal use and stem global warming. Maybe it's a message we need to hear about what we could do with the excess nuclear weapons? Better to light a home than curse the darkness of a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter.