http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/-nrdcs-tom-cochran-assesses-breeder-prospectsNRDC's Tom Cochran Assesses Breeder Prospects
POSTED BY: Bill Sweet / Thu, October 07, 2010
Tom Cochran, a PhD particle physicist and lifelong staff member of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., wrote a book about breeder reactors in 1974 that had considerable influence. At the time, the U.S. breeder program was the biggest single R&D item in the Federal budget; Cochran’s book, commissioned by Resources for the Future, took a highly critical look at estimated costs and projected engineering performance for fast reactors. In April 1977, newly elected president Jimmy Carter suspended plans to build a demonstration breeder at Clinch River, Tennessee, and along with it plans to introduce commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels.
Despite setbacks in virtually all other breeder development programs, a recent MIT report continues to envision a future in which breeders might play a big part. Cochran comments as follows:
MIT basically got it right when projecting future uranium costs, though they didn't also take into account that enrichment costs will go down. The bottom line is that nuclear fuel costs will not move significantly in the next 100 years from where they are today.
Their conclusion, being from a university heavily engaged in research, is that this leaves lots of time to do all kinds of research on all kinds of things. My conclusion is that we don't need to do more research on alternative fuel cycles at this time. What we need to focus on is bringing down the capital costs of standard light water reactors. Historically, however, the government has boxed itself in by funding primarily research on the back end of the fuel cycle--spent fuel processing and nuclear waste disposal--and technologies relying on alternative fuel cycles, including the fast reactor.
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