Reply #32: Spent fuel reprocessing will be enormously expensive [View All]

[jpak]

Japan's Rokkasho reprocessing plant will cost $20+ billion to build and billions more to operate. Moreover, it is just plain uneconomic....

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj01burnie

http://www.n-base.org.uk/public/report_links/crisis.html

http://www.wise-paris.org/index.html?/english/othersnews/year_2001/othersnews010515.html&/english/frame/menu.html&/english/frame/band.html

and it's a dirty nasty business....

http://users.michiana.org/greens/editorial/nucnews.htm

and breeders have never lived up to their promises..

...and every sodium-cooled commercial prototype breeder ever built has suffered serious sodium fires that led to prolonged shut-downs and/or decomissioning...

http://www.nci.org/01NCI/12/FFTF.htm (note: I went to grad school with Tom Clements)

...and they're enormously expensive: $9-11,000 per installed kW (compared this to ~$5000 per installed kW for the last few US light-water reactors built and $1-1200 per kW for new coal and wind turbine capacity).

http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nucleararticles/breeders_dying.htm

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma01makhijani

http://www.iaea.org/inis/aws/fnss/phenix/book/

...and the US would have to design, license and build a new generation of light-water reactors to effectively use MOX fuel.

Any way you look at it the Plutonium Economy sucks....