Breeder reactors Bush's Plan is unsafe

[IChing]

France has not built new plants and has no plans for new reactors. Bush lies, people die
From the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist.

Bad ideas seldom die: they simply go into hibernation, ready to burst forth when conditions ripen.

A decade ago, the transmutation of high-level nuclear waste was widely seen as a dead end. It was too complex, too congenial to proliferation, and too expensive. But today, transmutation research is again fashionable. At international energy conferences it is lauded as "bringing to the table new concepts that could be relevant for next-generation power producing systems" and as being "rather seductive to all of us" because it will require "new reprocessing techniques, new fuel developments, additional nuclear data, new reactors and irradiation facilities." In 1999, Europe's Nuclear Energy Agency said transmutation research in Japan would help bring "the nuclear option into the twenty-first century in a healthy state." And in January, Pete Domenici, New Mexico's Republican senator, secured $34 million to test the technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

What's going on? How did moribund, poorly coordinated research programs on transmutation spring back to life? In a word: politics.
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The case against it
Proponents claim that transmutation--once developed and refined--will help solve the nuclear waste problem. Transmutation has even been described by Los Alamos as the solution to the proliferation problem. Neither claim is likely to prove out.

Rather, a close look suggests that transmutation research in the field has been driven by political forces intent on propping up the nuclear power enterprise.

A great deal of work and money--perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars--would be needed to fully develop and build the types of reactors needed for transmutation. These "fast neutron" machines would include subcritical reactors driven by neutron-producing proton accelerators, as well as fast-neutron "plutonium burner" reactors--varieties of breeder reactors first conceived during the Manhattan Project.

Transmutation was intensively investigated in the 1980s and looked at again in the mid-1990s, and found wanting. It was an inefficient way to address problems in nuclear waste management; it was too expensive; and it presented serious proliferation concerns.
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http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma01makhijani

[Kolesar]

1. You ought to post this in the E&E forum

I would like to know what more-well-read-than-I posters have to say in response to it.

[IChing]

2. Done

It is a major part of bushenfurher energy plan and needs a debate. thanks move it.

[Kolesar]

3. thanks for moving it

I read it. It crushed some of my hopes & put the fear back into me.