By Fred Pearce. Originally published at Yale Environment 360.
Plutonium is the nuclear nightmare. A by-product of conventional power-station reactors, it is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. And even when not made into bombs, it is a million-year radioactive waste legacy that is already costing the world billions of dollars a year to contain.
And yet, some scientists say, we have the technology to burn plutonium in a new generation of "fast" reactors. That could dispose of the waste problem, reducing the threat of radiation and nuclear proliferation, and at the same time generate vast amounts of low-carbon energy. It sounds too good to be true. So are the techno-optimists right -- or should the conventional environmental revulsion at all things nuclear still hold?
Fast-breeder technology is almost as old as nuclear power. But after almost two decades in the wilderness, it could be poised to take off. The U.S. corporation GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) is promoting a reactor design called the PRISM (for Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular) that its chief consulting engineer and fast-breeder guru, Eric Loewen, says is a safe and secure way to power the world using yesterday's nuclear waste.
The PRISM (Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular) reactor being developed by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy would consume spent nuclear fuel to generate electricity. A design such as this one is now being considered at Sellafield in the UK, with proponents saying it is an effective and safe way to recycle nuclear waste and critics charging it would be unsafe and expensive. (Courtesy of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy)
The company wants to try out the idea for the first time on the northwest coast of England, at the notorious nuclear dumping ground at Sellafield, which holds the world's largest stock of civilian plutonium. At close to 120 tons, it stores more plutonium from reactors than the U.S. and Russia Britain's huge plutonium stockpile makes it a vast energy resource. combined.
While most of the world's civilian plutonium waste is still trapped inside highly radioactive spent fuel, much of that British plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder. It has been extracted from spent fuel with the intention of using it to power an earlier generation of fast reactors that were never built. This makes it much more vulnerable to theft and use in nuclear weapons than plutonium still held inside spent fuel, as most of the U.S. stockpile is.
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