Unfortunately you've been hoodwinked by a lie from an industry intent on trying to convince a gullible public that their product is needed and safe. They have an active web-based disinformation campaign at work to promote false claims such as you've repeated.
Would you trust claims like that from BP?
REPORT: UNSUCCESSFUL “FAST BREEDER” IS NO SOLUTION FOR LONG- TERM REACTOR WASTE DISPOSAL ISSUES
After Over $50 Billion Spent by US, Japan, Russia, UK, India and France, No Commercial Model Found; High Cost, Unreliability, Major Safety Problems and Proliferation Risks All Seen as Major Barriers to Use.
PRINCETON, N.J. – February 17, 2010 – Hopes that the “fast breeder”– a plutonium‐fueled nuclear reactor designed to produce more fuel than it consumed -- might serve as a major part of the long-term nuclear waste disposal solution are not merited by the dismal track record to date of such sodium-cooled reactors in France, India, Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to a major new study from the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM).
Titled “Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status,” the IPFM report concludes: “The problems (with fast breeder reactors) ... make it hard to dispute Admiral Hyman Rickover’s summation in 1956, based on his experience with a sodium-cooled reactor developed to power an early U.S. nuclear submarine, that such reactors are ‘expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.’”
Plagued by high costs, often multi-year downtime for repairs (including a 15-year reactor restart delay in Japan), multiple safety problems (among them often catastrophic sodium fires triggered simply by contact with oxygen), and unresolved proliferation risks, “fast breeder” reactors already have been the focus of more than $50 billion in development spending, including more than $10 billion each by the U.S., Japan and Russia. As the IPFM report notes: “Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is anywhere near economically competitive with light-water reactors ... After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries.”
The new IPFM report is a timely and important addition to the understanding about reactor technology. Today, with increased attention being paid both to so-called “Generation IV” reactors, some of which are based on the fast reactor technology, and a new Obama Administration panel focusing on reprocessing and other waste issues, interest in some quarters has shifted back to fast reactors as a possible means by which to bypass concerns about the long- term storage of nuclear waste....
You can download the full report here:
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/pages_us_en/nuclearenergy/nuclearenergy/nuclearenergy.php
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
