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. Today's post is the second in a series about the history and current status of breeder reactors in the United Kingdom.
In the mid 1970s, even with the many problems that plagued the Prototype Fast Reactor project (PFR), the Atomic Energy Agency was still pushing for a fleet of breeder reactors. The AEA had been lobbying the British government for permission to build a fuel scale fast breeder reactor with over a gigawatt capacity referred to as the Commercial Fast Reactor (CFR). By 1976, the AEA was spending over a hundred million British pounds a year on research, development for the CFR.
In 1976, the Flowers Commission called for a clear distinction between a full scale commercial fast breeder reactor and a demonstration breeder reactor. The commission was concerned about all the problems that the DFR and PFR revealed with respect to fast breeder reactor design. A Royal Commission also questioned the wisdom of moving to what Glenn Seaborg called a "plutonium economy." These commissions were in direct opposition to the rapid development of a fleet of fast breeder reactors.
In May 1977, at the Dounreay site on the coast of Scotland, a variety of discarded materials were stuffed down a tunnel dug under the seabed to dispose of waste. The sodium-potassium coolant mixed with the other waste generated hydrogen gas which resulted in an explosion that blew of the five ton lid on the tunnel. Debris from the tunnel was scattered over a wide area. This accident happened less than a month before a public hearing on the proposed Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at the Windscale facility. THORP was designed to reprocess plutonium from the fleet of fast breeder reactor power stations envisioned by the AEA.
Despite the skepticism of the previous commissions with respect to the construction of a full scale fast breeder power reactor, there were still calls for a single demonstration fast breeder reactor. The AEA however wanted to build a commercial reactor rather than an experimental reactor because if they built a power reactor, it would be paid for by the electrical utilities and not the AEA. The Central Electricity Generation Board said that they would make land available and let the AEA hook up the new reactor to the national grid but they would not pay for it. There had been a softening of demand for electricity since the oil crisis of 1974 and national utilities already had excess capacity. In 1978, the British government shifted support from fast breeder reactors to pressurize water reactors for power generation.
The election of Margret Thatcher in 1979 resulted in renewed support for fast breeders. The official position was that the UK was a leader in fast breeder research and that fast breeders were important because of their ability to breed more fissile material for fuel. Critics said that the money being poured into worldwide research into fast breeder reactors was difficult to justify because of the complexity and cost of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
In 1984, a government report was issued that stated over two hundred and forty million British pounds had been spent on fast breeders so far and that another hundred and thirty billion would need to be spent to commercialize fast breeder reactors by 2015. The report was not enthusiastic about expending such huge sums of money for a program that might bear fruit in thirty years.
In 1985, just as the AEA was promoting the construction of a European Demonstration Reprocessing Plant for the fast breeder reactor at Dounreay, the Thatcher government cut funding for fast breeder development. The disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 shocked the whole world and cast a pall over nuclear energy development in general.
In 1988, the British government slashed funds for fast breeder development from one hundred million pounds to ten million pounds annually. Work on the PFR was to end in 1994 and work on reprocessing was to end in 1997. The vision of powering the UK with fast breeder reactors was abandoned.
Prototype Fast Reactor building at Dounreay:
