Word: clinched
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Congress gave Clinch River the go-ahead despite mounting evidence that the reactor is an unnecessary and colossally mismanaged boondoggle-and potentially dangerous as well. Four days before the House vote, an Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee staff issued an excoriating report on the project subtitled "A Cost and Technical Fiasco." The report cited well-known problems, like Clinch River's increase in cost from $669 million in 1973 to at least $3.2 billion, and raised again questions about the adequacy of the reactor's safety mechanisms...
...these contracts." A steam generator priced at $5 million in 1975 actually cost the Government $71 million. The report found evidence of both bribery and fraud by some contractors. A consortium of 753 private utilities agreed in 1973 to put up more than a third of the capital for Clinch River. Thanks to the cost overruns, the private sector investment will be no more than 8%, and probably less...
...heart of the Clinch River debate are not its finances but its technology; the 375-megawatt plant to be built is a breeder reactor, which creates more atomic fuel than it burns. The physics behind this alchemy is not new. A few light bulbs were powered by the first tiny breeder 30 years ago, and a 200-MW breeder plant was fired up-and failed-near Detroit in 1966. Conventional nuclear reactors also create fuel, but about 35% less than they consume, rather than, like breeders, about 20% more. Says A. David Rossin of the American Nuclear Society: "Breeder reactors...
Indeed, Britain, West Germany, the Soviet Union and France are already operating breeders more advanced than the one not yet built at Clinch River. To critics this argues against a U.S. commitment to the expensive Tennessee project. "It's like the Concorde," "says Vanderbilt University Physicist John Barach. "Let the French do it. If we need it, we can get them to license a breeder to this country...
Breeders can be fueled by uranium or Plutonium, but they produce only the latter. Plutonium is a far handier substance for making bombs, and some skittish critics are afraid that Clinch River might become a target for terrorists seeking to cadge a few pounds of plutonium to make an atomic weapon. The reactor is designed to be cooled by liquid sodium, a highly volatile substance, and there are some doubts about the ability of the reactor to control a catastrophic leakage in the sodium ducts. "It is a much more dangerous and complex device than other reactors," says Vanderbilt...