My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. Today will the second part of my review of the history of breeder reactors in the United States.
Yesterday, I talked about the experimental breeder reactors developed during the 1950s and early 1960s in the US. They had serious problems and reduced US enthusiasm for breeder reactors.
In 1956, ground was broken at a site about thirty miles from Detroit, Michigan on the shores of Lake Erie for the most ambitious US breeder reactor up to that time. It was dubbed the Enrico Fermi Breeder Reactor Project and thirty four companies were involved in the project under the umbrella of the Power Reactor Development Corporation. (PRDC) The Fermi 1 reactor was a sodium cooled reactor fueled with highly enriched uranium. It was a two loop design with the sodium that cooled the core transferring its heat to a secondary sodium cooling system. It began operating in 1963. In late 1966, there was a partial core meltdown caused by a blockage of the sodium flow through the core. Two rods melted down but no radiation was released into the environment. It took four years to repair the reactor and it was put back into operation in 1970. It generated a small fraction of its rated power output in 1971 and the PRDC decided that it was not a practical source of electrical power. The reactor was turned off in 1972 and subsequently decommissioned.
All the early fast breeder used metal fuels. In the 1960s, research began on fast breeder reactor designs that would be fueled with ceramic pellets containing a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide. The Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor was built near Strickler, Arkansas to test MOX fuel in breeder reactors. It started operation in 1969 and was shut down in 1972 after verifying that MOX had advantages over metal fuel.
Despite all these problems, the Atomic Energy Commission focused on developing commercial fast breeder reactors for generating electricity during the 1960s. They poured money and manpower into research and promotion of fast breeder reactors. They hoped that government subsidies would entice utilities to adopt the breeder reactors. In 1968, the AEC issued a 10 volume program plan for liquid metal fast breeder reactors. The development of LMFBRs became a national priority. The AEC hoped to see the development of a robust commercial LMFBR industry in the US starting in 1984. The AEC produced some projections of decreasing costs for fast breeder reactors and increasing profitability for these new reactors. Unfortunately, these projections turned out to be far too optimistic. In the next article in this series, we will deal with the rise and fall of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor which was to be a demonstration of the potential of the AEC LMFBRs.
Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor:
