Word: breeders
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...Russians also found it difficult to understand the resistance in the U.S. to the construction of nuclear power plants, especially the breeder type, which produces more atomic fuel than it consumes. The Soviets now have one small experimental breeder at Obninsk and another, much larger, 600,000-kw. plant at Beloyarskoye; none of their six nuclear power plants now in full operation has had a serious accident. Proud of their own safety procedures, they dismissed as useless the American practice of enclosing nuclear reactors in large protective shells; "Purely psychological," said Igor Morokhov, No. 2 man of the Soviet atomic...
...fast breeder seems to be a miraculous machine indeed. It produces slightly more fuel than it consumes, thus extending fuel supplies for centuries.* It wastes less heat energy than any other kind of power plant available today, and it seems technically feasible (though the biggest prototype partially melted in 1966). The AEC aims to have a $500 million demonstration plant operating by 1980, probably in the Tennessee Valley Authority's network. Says AEC Chairman James Schlesinger, who took over the agency a year ago: "If we don't have breeder technology in the 1990s, the regrets could...
...breeder is a monster," says David Comey, environmental director for Chicago's Businessmen in the Public Interest. Nuclear Pioneer George Weil agrees, calling the breeder concept "dangerous and unproved." Some objections focus on the use of liquid sodium (a tricky substance that explodes on contact with water and burns in air) as a cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years...
...should be spending $2 billion a year on research into the alternatives, not $600 million," says Energy Consultant Freeman. "We're going into the future with only one arrow for our bow, the breeder. If it doesn't work out, we'll face a real crisis." Actually, the utilities have already proposed various surcharges that would raise some $400 million a year entirely for future research...
...original fuel (fissionable uranium 235, or plutonium) is surrounded by a "blanket" of nonfissionable uranium 238, which absorbs neutrons from the chain reaction in the core. These neutrons transmute the U-238 in the blanket into plutonium, which can fuel another breeder...