My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed global interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. I have been covering the history of United States breeder reactor research and development in the past several posts. My previous post told about how the some U.S. lost interest in breeder reactors in the 1980s. Today, I am going to deal with efforts to sustain and revive research into breeder reactors up to the present day.
In 2001, the United States invited other countries interested in nuclear power to join a new international program called the Generation IV International Forum (also known as Gen IV Forum). Gen IV Forum supports collaboration in the design of a new generation of nuclear reactors which are projected to be available after 2030. Six different types of reactor design were selected for research and development. Three fast breeder reactor concepts were included with three different coolants; liquid sodium, liquid lead-bismuth alloy and helium. This collaboration has focused on "coordinating and pooling national research on reactor design, safety, proliferation resistance, fuel fabrication technologies, material development, and other topics."
In addition to the Gen IV Forum collaboration, a second international nuclear organization was created by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This program was named the International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO). Part of the reason for this second attempt at collaboration was the fact that the Gen IV Forum, initiated by the U.S. excluded countries such as Russia that the U.S. did not have nuclear cooperation agreements with. INPRO has issued a document that provides guidance in evaluating new nuclear technologies as well as a number of manuals to assist in implementing the processes outlined in the first document. INPRO members are currently working on research projects.
The Bush Administration proposed a new program called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) in 2006. The stated purpose of this program is to expand the use of nuclear power in the U.S. and other countries while working against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In addition, GNEP was also intended to work towards a permanent geologic storage facility for nuclear waste. Part of the GNEP proposal was to give up on the once through nuclear fuel process with the necessity of burying spent nuclear fuel. The alternative that was proposed was to develop a closed fuel cycle based on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and burning it in fast breeder reactors to produce more energy and reduce the really hot and long lived transuranic elements. The breeder reactors would be designed to not breed more fissile materials than they consumed.
In mid-2009, the domestic portion of GNEP was cancelled by the U.S. DOE as instructed by the Obama Administration. An effort by the U.S. Department of Energy to move to commercialization of breeder technology in the near future was also abandoned. The position of the Obama Administration is that the U.S. will not pursue domestic commercial reprocessing. The future of breeder reactors in the U.S. is not bright.
