nuclear-news

How fast breeder nuclear reactors were tried in USA, and failed

Despite the efforts of the country’s best minds and nearly limitless budgets, the breeder program did not work. And it was not only the Clinch River team who failed. Breeder programs in Germany, France and the United Kingdom also could not make the leap from lab experiment to commercially viable practice. 

United States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons of Plutonium, DC Bureau By Joseph Trento,  April 9th, 2012.….Reversing Course – Reagan Undermines Carter’s Policies Richard Kennedy  One of the most passionate nuclear believers was a career bureaucrat named Richard Kennedy. A former Army officer, he labored in obscurity at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, his career held hostage by his vehement opposition to President Carter’s nuclear policies. All of that changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. One of Reagan’s first acts as president was to effectively reverse Carter’s nuclear doctrine, which had barred the United States from using plutonium in civilian power projects with America’s friends or adversaries.

Reagan made Kennedy his right-hand man for nuclear affairs. From his new post as Ambassador at Large for Nuclear Energy, Kennedy oversaw the dismantling of the Carter policies he despised. The new administration rejuvenated American and international reliance on plutonium.

But one legacy of the Carter years hobbled America’s headlong leap into international nuclear commerce. Carter had pushed through Congress in 1978 the Atomic Energy Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that strictly limited how foreign countries could import and use nuclear materials originating in the United States. Under the Act, Congress had to approve every single shipment of reactor fuel that crossed an international border. The law was an insufferable impediment to Kennedy’s vision of unfettered nuclear commerce. So he set out to circumvent it.

In the early days of the Reagan buildup, as the massive injection of cash into America’s conventional and nuclear war-making industries dramatically increased, the administration force-fed money to the nuclear scientists designing new warheads and attempting to solve the nuclear breeder reactor conundrum.
At the center of this plan was an experimental facility at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee’s scenic Clinch River valley. Here in the Appalachian foothills, America’s most brilliant scientists were assembling a breeder reactor. The technology held incredible promise. As it generated power, it transformed previously spent nuclear fuel into pure plutonium. The breeder became the Holy Grail of nuclear science, a closed fuel cycle that would open up an almost limitless supply of energy. The Clinch River breeder project was on the cutting edge of technology, and, under Reagan, the Department of Energy flooded the project with money. The project cost $16 billion dollars between 1980 and 1987. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, Congress stopped the program cold.

Despite the efforts of the country’s best minds and nearly limitless budgets, the breeder program did not work. And it was not only the Clinch River team who failed. Breeder programs in Germany, France and the United Kingdom also could not make the leap from lab experiment to commercially viable practice. Reagan’s commitment to new nuclear weapons never flagged, but as the mid-eighties recession dragged on, he could not protect every facet of the military industrial complex from congressional cost-cutting. In 1987, Congress pulled the funding on Clinch River. To the cadre of scientists and Energy Department bureaucrats who had made the breeder reactor their life’s work, it was a disaster. Yet despite their failure and the nation’s lack of support, they remained faithful to the idea of the nuclear fuel cycle.

In the meantime, one country was still doggedly pursuing the breeder technology: Japan. In 1987, the resources of Japan’s runaway economy seemed limitless. If any nation could make the breeder economically viable, it was Japan. But if Japanese scientists were to succeed, they would need to start where the Americans had left off. ….  http://www.dcbureau.org/201204097128/national-security-news-service/united-states-circumvented-laws-to-help-japan-accumulate-tons-of-plutonium.html

August 10, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, reprocessing, USA