Liquid metal fast breeder reactors have been, in general, commercial failures, the most famous cases being the French Superphenix reactor and the second being the Japanese Monju reactor, the latter of which actually caught fire, much as the Fermi reactor in the United States did in 1970.
One can always get an anti-nuke to go on and on and on and on forever about how they hate liquid metal fast breeder reactors, even though the number of people who have been killed by nuclear events in commercial fast breeder reactor fires in the United States, Japan and France combined is zero. (A researcher was killed in a US steam explosion in the early 1950's making fast breeder reactors in period 1950-1970 in the US as dangerous as wind turbines in Oregon were in 2007.)
Let me be clear about something: I'm not a fan of liquid sodium or liquid sodium/potassium fast breeder reactors, even though the Phoenix 233 MWe reactor has operated successfully for 35 years, and the BN-600 in the Russian Urals has been operating more or less continuously for 27 years.
Overall, I claim, liquid metal fast breeder reactors have been technical and commercial failures.
The biggest reason that fast breeder reactors are commercial failures is that uranium is cheap. A kg of uranium, which costs anywhere, depending on flucuations in the market from $10/kg to $100/kg has the energy content of 600,000 gallons of gasoline, roughly.
Some people think that uranium prices will rise to well above that, but frankly, it doesn't matter. Uranium at $2000/kg is cheaper than crude oil, way cheaper.
At the dawn of the nuclear age, no one was sure that this would be the case. At the time, it was thought that uranium was a rare element, leading to a lot of Spy v. Spy intrigue involving German guys and French guys and English guys and American guys, and even some Belgian guys and Congolese guys and Czech guys, but after all that romantic stuff was done it was found that uranium is a very common element, present in earth's crust in quantities roughly comparable to tin.
Although I support nuclear fuel reprocessing as the responsible thing to do - as I will outline below - it must be said that the waste mentality represented by the "once through" nuclear fuel cycle is for the moment, as it was in the last half a century, ostensibly much cheaper than nuclear fuel recycling.
There are 3 to 5 billion tons of uranium in ocean water, almost all of it having leached out of granite over billions of years of weathering. Thermodynamic arguments as well as experimental results show that this uranium is recoverable as fuel.
Occassionally I hear from people who claim to be experts in topics about which they know nothing at all - nuclear energy - rail on about about "peak uranium."
Whatever gets you through the night.
Some day, when I'm bored and really, really, really, really, really tired and I am faced with the choice of picking lint out of my navel like a guy dreaming of his solar powered electric car or rereading half a century of "nuclear terrorist" scare stories in the World Weekly News - whoops I mean the New York Times - I'll do one of those fun Gibbs free energy of mixing calculations involving seawater and uranium, but not tonight.
The relative expense of recovering uranium from seawater - or even better, using land based thorium - and using either in nuclear reactors is cheaper in units of dollars per gram than using plutonium recovered from used nuclear fuel. In the 50 years of commercial nuclear power this has, despite much prognosticating to the contrary, always been true.
Does this mean that using and making plutonium is unwise?
Not at all.
People pronosticate all the time about energy. Not so long ago people were predicting $200/barrel oil and recently the price has been something like 20% of that. Does this mean oil is affordable?
Not at all.
If oil was as cheap as uranium in mass to energy ratio terms, it would still be too expensive, since it is impossible to permanently dispose of dangerous fossil fuel waste, while it is technically relatively simple in the nuclear case.
Advances in plutonium chemistry have actually been quite spectacular, particularly since we are now entering the golden age of solvents - with low temperature ionic liquids now becoming a well understood, if not mature technology, and high temperature molten salts being far more accessible through the huge burst of materials science understanding, including so called "nanotechnology."
Yet the impetus for building new infrastructure to deal with this knowledge and to recover plutonium in ways that at superior to the ways it is recovered now have been vanishingly small. The only major new industrial plutonium facility built in the recent two decades is the Japanese plutonium reprocessing plant. Even though the Monju fast breeder reactor has been a failure the reprocessing plant is not sufficiently sized even to recycle Japan's thermal reactor plutonium. Moreover the new Japanese plant is decided pedestrian in its chemistry, relying for the most part on old fashioned solvent extraction with some cute updates.
However none of this proves the plant to be a bad idea.
In fact, plutonium recovery from used nuclear fuel by the current method is pretty damn good. It is nowhere near as dangerous as say, oil refining, although you cna find lots and lots and lots of people who whine endlessly about a leaky pipe at Sellafield injuring NOBODY, and absolutely nobody who gives a rat's ass about the Texas City Oil refinery, owned by "Beyond Petroleum" BP, explosion in March of 2005 that killed 15 people and injured - many seriously - 170 more. The Texas City Oil refinery would be improved if was as safe as refining plutonium from used nuclear fuel.
But economics and safety, criteria by which plutonium is safer to use than any dangerous fossil fuel is not the best reason for refining plutonium.
The best reason for building new commercial plutonium infrastructure is to refine plutonium is far more compelling: It has to do with the speed of scale up of climate change gas free energy.
At being a quickly scalable alternative to dangerous fossil fuels nuclear energy is vastly superior to any other form of energy. But the question is whether it is faster than the silly, trivial, solar industry - which is not hard in any case - but whether it is fast enough to address global climate change.
Suppose the planet committed to phase out coal, something that I argue it both should and must do. Wind and solar are NOT alternatives to coal but, be that is it may, there is a lot of delusional claims that they could be even though coal plants are designed to operate more or less continuously. However after decades of elaborate garbage speeches and garbage writing on this topic the requisite storage systems are still all talk and no action.
But Let's pretend that the only thing that counted was energy output and that the timing of that output was irrelevant:
The United States right now is approaching 75,000 MT of used nuclear fuel. Ninety-five percent of this fuel is slightly enriched uranium which can be - as I often point out - used again without reprocessing. This would require the use of CANDU type reactors that constitute nearly the entire nuclear power infrastructure of Canada, India, Pakistan, Romania and Argentina as well as a significant portion of the infrastructure of South Korea. (When I say "no reprocessing," I mean no chemical reprocessing is necessary.) Obviously, with nuclear energy having supplied 20% of US electricity for more than two decades - and a smaller but sigificant percentage before that - a lot of of spent fuel - and energy - is available.
Because of the innate sensibility of this relatively simple scheme, I would like to see the United States build CANDU infrastructure with our Canadian neighbors' help, and several of my recent diaries have advocated just this.
Even so, still I believe we must have and isolate plutonium.
The plutonium content of most used LWR nuclear fuel is between 1 and 2 percent, suggesting that there is somewhere about 1000 MT +/- a few tens of metric tons of plutonium in used US nuclear fuel. It can be shown that the energy content of 1000 MT plutonium is about 80 exajoules or - using 200 MeV per fission as a loose approximation - roughly about 80% of the entire US energy consumption for one year including dangerous fossil fuels and the minor contribution from so called "renewable energy." The US burns about 85 exajoules of dangerous fossil fuels each year - resulting in huge losses of human life and huge destruction of wild habitat, including the entire arctic ecosystem. Nuclear provides just over 8 exajoules. The vast remainder of the balance is hydroelectricity, with less than one exajoule deriving from wind, solar, and geothermal combined.
But plutonium recovery's too expensive, right?
Compared to what?
Compared to the perenially cheer-inducing solar energy industry which has, in 50 years of such cheering, produced far more chemical waste (not even counting batteries) than exajoules, especially when you consider the energy consumption involved in just the cheering itself, in energy consuming things like phamplets, web sites, attendence at conferences and workshops and solar festivals?
Compared to the entire destruction of the earth's atmosphere because it is physically, economically and politically not feasible to contain dangerous fossil fuel wastes?
Compared to the 2 million people who die each year on this planet simply because their flesh is spent on air pollution related to the dangerous fossil fuel and biofuels industries?
Hardly.
Plutonium, which costs about $1000/kg to isolate is cheap.
The reason for isolating and using plutonium, besides the benefits of reducing the risk of nuclear war - a small but real risk - and reducing the need for storage space for nuclear by-products - is the advantage of maintaining speed of scale up of nuclear energy essentially forever. Among climate change gas free strategies for producing electricity, nuclear energy has always, since its discovery shortly before the point where world population grew over the 2.5 billion mark, been the last, best, hope of humankind in energy terms.
Despite much wrong hyperbole by otherwise intelligent people - including even Al Gore - nuclear energy has proved to be the fastest and largest means of scaling up climate change gas free electricity production in history. This was true in the 1960's, true in the 1970's, true in the 1990's, and true in the 2000's.
As I recently pointed out, one nuclear reactor built in Finland, with first poured concrete taking place in 2005 and projected finish in 2012 including FOAKE delays, will produce 5 times as much energy as all the wind infrastructure of all the much vaunted Danish windmills. In fact the cloture of just two German nuclear reactor will erase any and all advantages of German wind energy constructed and operable as of 2005 according to the German Wind Industry, which said it was producing 17TWh in that year even ignoring the need for spinning reserve back up required for wind plants, since the continuous average power output represented by 17TWh/a is about 1,900 MWe.
Thus the largest wind industry in the world - for its entire existence up to 2005 - has been incapable of matching the power output of two moderate sized nuclear reactors historically built in less than 10 years.
But what about the much discussed fear of nuclear war and its putative connection to nuclear energy?
There are only a few nuclear technologies that are effectively usuable for both commercial and warlike purposes, although the latter potential is not - despite much caterwauling to the contrary by dumb fundie anti-nukes - the same as a certainty. The fact that coal can be used to fuel battleships like the ones that killed a great number of people at the battle of Jutland does not mean that coal must be used for future Battles of Jutland, just as the use of internal combustion engines in tanks now trashing Gaza, Iraq and other places does not mean that dangerous fossil fuel powered Toyota Priuses are weapons of mass destruction. The choice to use a technology for war is just that, a choice. There are ZERO options for preventing the diversion of any technology for war except, maybe, teaching peace, which in itself has nothing to do with technology at all, although the failure of the will to peace may involve poverty, economic poverty and poverty of the imagination.
Please note that my unyielding call for the immediate phase out of dangerous fossil fuels - the pacifism of my entire adult life notwithstanding - is not connected to the existence of napalm bombs, cluster bombs and jet powered dive bombers, although the elimination of these devices is clearly desirable. Despite the existence of these devices it is very clear that the majority of dangerous fossil fuel machines on this planet - there are too many of them - are used for commercial and personal, and not warlike, purposes.
But, this said, if even only in theory, what nuclear technologies are feasible for weapons diversion?
Zero nuclear power reactors have ever been used to make bombs used in a war, but just one nuclear reactor of any type ever built has been used as a tool to conduct an actual nuclear war. The reactor in question was a graphite moderated nuclear reactor that was similar in design and technology to the type of reactor that exploded at Chernobyl, a graphite moderated reactor. That reactor was operated to produce the plutonium that destroyed the city of Nagasaki in a few seconds, but it produced no electricity whatsoever while doing so. Nevertheless clearly it is an experimental truth that graphite moderated reactors can be used to make weapons grade material.
These types reactors can, in fact, be dual use, as evidenced by the reality that John F. Kennedy and Scoop Jackson insisted on building such a reactor in Washington State, a reactor that provided power to the Northwest power grid until shortly after Chernobyl, whereupon it was shut and replaced by dangerous fossil fuel burning.
Another technology that can clearly be diverted to use for war-like purposes, and which was in fact used to make materials for 50% of nuclear attacks in actual nuclear war - which is to say one attack - an attack carried out using as a delivery device a machine powered by dangerous fossil fuels - a B-25 bomber - is uranium enrichment.
Even if all the world's nuclear power plants were shut by irrationality, the feasibility of using this technology to conduct nuclear war, albeit powered by dangerous fossil fuels or even wind or solar plants would still exist. Enrichment plants can be operated using electricity, irrespective of the source of that electricity. I note that the only country ever to have launched a nuclear war enriched uranium for that purpose using coal fired and renewable (hydro) energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The diversion of dangerous coal and dangerous hydroelectricity to make enriched uranium has nothing to do with the reasons that we should eliminate coal and limit hydroelectric plants. The reason for doing these things has nothing to do with war.
This is not to say that nuclear technology is not involved in war and in the risk of war: Like all human technologies, from the use of wind to the use of coal and especially the use (and requirement for) petroleum, there is a historical record that shows how such use is possible.
In the nuclear case there are two examples, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Many are still alive today however who remember how the Camelot President - who ordered the building of the Chernobyl-type dual use reactor at Hanford Washington - almost made that history much, much, much worse. Because we now have a very glamorous president - this time with both a brain and ethics, in contrast to the situtation that may have been obtained previously - it is worth reviewing this history in some detail, particularly with respect to potentially dual use nuclear technology.
The risk of nuclear war is low when compared with the observed certainty of dangerous fossil fuel war. However, it is not zero.
The United States is less involved in the risk of nuclear war than it has ever been, I think, going all the way back to the US invention of nuclear weapons in the period between 1941 and 1945. But this risk is not zero.
The highest risk of nuclear war - still low, but nevertheless risk maximized (meaning higher than all other risks) - is in the Asian sub-continent, where two guilty nations, India and Pakistan, foolishly confront one another with nuclear brinkmanship.
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of diaries on the topic of the potentially dual use fast breeder reactor in India, and my qualified support for it.