Are New Types of Reactors Needed for the U.S. Nuclear Renaissance?

 On February 16, President Barack Obama announced loan guarantees totaling more than $8 billion for two new light-water reactors in Georgia, part of an initiative to restart the nuclear power industry in the U.S. Just three weeks earlier, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu had announced the formation of a Blue-Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future to resolve what to do with the waste produced by those future reactors—as well as the 2,000 metric tons a year produced by the 104 reactors currently in operation in the U.S. After all, the Obama administration has halted plans to store spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada—a geologic repository that never opened.

Such struggles to find a permanent resting place for nuclear waste has prompted some to resurrect an idea that stretches back to the Manhattan Project: so-called fast-neutron reactors that can consume nuclear waste through fission. Whether it is billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates touting a new design for a traveling-wave reactor or the South Korean government promoting spent fuel reprocessing and fast breeder reactors, observers and governments seem to think it is time to reconsider fast reactors—despite the fact that the designs have a mixed track record. Since the 1950s, roughly $100 billion has been spent on the research and development of such reactors around the world, yet there is currently only one producing electricity—the BN-600 reactor in Russia, operational since 1980.

The U.S. "is at an impasse over disposing of nuclear waste," noted physicist Frank von Hippel of Princeton University and co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), during a February 17 conference call with reporters that included several physicists, his co-authors on a new report on such fast-neutron reactors. "The interest in these reactors is that fast-neutron reactors are more efficient at fissioning long-lived isotopes…[and]...fissioning long-lived isotopes will minimize the waste problem." Read More

Source: Scientific American