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 India.

            The Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) started planning for a larger Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) even before the Fast Breeder Test Reactor was started.  The DAE first requested money for the PRBR in 1983 and began expenditures in 1987. It was projected that the new reactor would go online by the year 2000. After missing the year 2000 startup, construction began in late 2004 and the PFBR now was projected to  go online in 2010. In reality as of mid-2013, the PFBR was projected to go online in 2014. During the life of this project the cost has rising by over fifty percent.

            During its development and construction, the safety of the PFBT has been called into question. There is a danger of terrible accidents with explosive energy releases and dispersion on radioactive materials over a large area. The core as designed is not as reactive as it could be. If an accident damaged the fuel rods, the level of the reaction could increase in a positive feedback loop and cause a catastrophe. There is a another potential problem involving the sodium coolant. If the coolant rises above the standard operating level, it will become less dense and the reactivity would increase causing similar problems to those listed above for the fuel rod damage.

           In addition to problems with the fuel rod and sodium coolant reactivity issues, the PFBR also has weak containment. As designed, the containment could only withstand pressures twenty five percent over normal atmospheric pressure. Using a combination of size and containment for comparison, the PFBR containment is weaker than almost all the other demonstration breeder reactors in the world. Containment vessels for light water reactors may be up to ten times better than the PFBR containment. The Indian design team excuses this weak containment on the basis of very optimistic projections about possible accidents that the PFBR may encounter. Less optimistic projections suggest that the containment of the PFBR is far from adequate.

           Indian’s justification for the creation of breeder reactors is that India has very little uranium. Actually, India has a variety of sources of uranium which could be exploited for different costs. India relies on pressurized heavy water reactors for nuclear power.  The Indians have made very optimistic projections about the ability of breeder reactors to produce electricity at roughly the same cost as the pressurized heavy water reactors currently in use. Other countries have found that breeder reactors are much more expensive and difficult to construct and operate safely than the non-breeder reactors that are currently used for power production. The DAE has consistently underestimated the construction costs for all of the existing Indian reactors.

          Cost analysis of uranium and plutonium for use in breeder versus non-breeder reactors reveals that India has plenty of uranium for its convention reactors to last for decades which invalidate that claim that India needs breeder reactors for fuel production. Breeder reactors can also produce weapons grade plutonium. Some observers suspect that what India is really after is a steady source of high grade plutonium for its nuclear weapons program. India has resisted international efforts to constrain the Indian breeder reactors under development to purely civil energy production.

          India has outlined a very aggressive breeder reactor program projecting twenty gigawatts capacity by 2020 and two hundred and seventy five gigawatt capacity by 2052. Declining international restrictions on exporting nuclear fuel to India have given rise to even higher estimates of future breeder reactor capacity in India. Once again, it appears that the DAE is being over-optimistic with estimates of plutonium production that are not realistic even without the inevitable accidents, delays, and under-estimated costs. Given the experience of other countries which have had aggressive breeder reactor programs, it is unlikely that the envisioned bright future for breeder reactors will ever materialize in India.  

Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor:

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Water with traces of a radioactive hydrogen isotope has again leaked at Catawba Nuclear Station in York County, South Carolina. charlotte.cbslocal.com

Ambient office = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Top Foods =  186 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 151 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 135 nanosieverts per hour

            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 first in a series about the history and current status of breeder reactors in India.

            India started talking about fast breeder reactor technology in the 1950s in order to develop an independent nuclear industry for power generation although they do not have much in the way of natural uranium resources. They set out on a three stage program that continues today.

             In the first stage, uranium fuel would be created and burned in heavy water reactors. The spent fuel from these reactors would then be reprocessed in order to extract the plutonium.

             The plutonium extracted during the first stage would then be used to fuel the cores for fast breeder reactors. There were two configurations for the second stage plutonium fueled reactors. In the first type, a blanket of natural or depleted uranium would be wrapped around the core to produce more plutonium. In the second type, thorium would be in the blanket  around the core and U-233 would be produced. The plan was to process uranium through the first type of fast breeder in order to produce enough plutonium to sustain the future fleet of anticipated reactors.

            In the third stage, when enough plutonium was available, a new generation of thorium breeders would be built. Although the thorium/U-233 fuel cycle was not as efficient or rapid as the uranium burning breeders, India has very little uranium and vast amounts of thorium.

             India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) began serious design studies on fast breeder reactors after 1960. An test fast breeder was constructed at the Bhabba Atomic Research Center in 1965 but was only tested for a few years. In 1969, India signs a collaborative agreement with the French Atomic Energy Commission. India obtained the design of the French Rapsodie reactor and the steam generator design from the French Phénix reactor. Combining these two designs, India began work on the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR). Indian scientists trained in France returned to India and began work at the new Reactor Research Center (RRC) in 1971 at Kalpakkam.

            The FTBR was supposed to be completed by 1976 but it only achieved criticality in late 1985 and began generating steam in 1993. The FTBR had major and minor acidents during the first fifteen years of operation. In 1987, the system that rotated fuel assemblies out of the core failed and resulting efforts  to deal with the problem occupied the next two years as successive as successive attempts to fix the problem resulted in even more mechanical damage. The original cause of the problem was never fully understood.

             In 2002, defective manufacturing of valves in the sodium coolant circulating system failed and over one hundred and fifty pounds of molten sodium leaked out onto the floor of the purification room and solidified. The sodium was radioactive and dangerous for workers. When normal air was used to replace the nitrogen around the purification room, the sodium started sparking and burning. The dust used to put out the fires hung in the air and made it difficult to see. The room was filled with nitrogen again and workers had to use mask supplied with oxygen through hoses. Finally, after three months, the sodium was removed.

            With the problems detailed above and other difficulties, the reactor never operated for more than fifty consecutive days. Over its lifetime it was available only twenty percent of the time. Even with this poor record, the Indian government claimed that the experiment had been a successful demonstration of the feasibility of fast breeder reactors.

India Fast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkam:

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Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL has signed a long-term contract to supply fuel for the second stage of China’s Tianwan nuclear power plant, plus equipment to enable China’s Yibin fabrication plant to manufacture fuel for Tianwan in future. world-nuclear-news.org

Unit 1 at India’s Kudankulam nuclear plant has connected to the grid, becoming the largest power reactor in the country and the first of several plants started in the last decade to come online. nuclearstreet.com

Ambient office = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Redleaf lettuce from Top Foods =  207 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 82 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Redleaf lettuce from Top Foods =  207 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 82 nanosieverts per hour

         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 post in a series about the history and current status of breeder reactors in the France.

         In 1976, a French council made the decision to build the Superphénix reactor near Lyon, France. The utilities rushed into planning and construction for the Superphénix before the decision was made public in 1977. Twenty thousand people came out to protest the project in the summer of 1976. Fifty cities and towns opposed the project. Thirteen hundred scientists published an open letter of their concerns to the governments of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The CEA Chairman remained highly optimistic about the future of fast breeder reactors. He predicted that almost six hundred Superphénix size fast breeder reactors would be in operation world wide by the year 2000 and that there would be almost three thousand by 2025. Actually, there were no such reactors in operation by 2000.

         A huge anti-nuclear demonstration took place at the Superphénix construction site with over fifty thousand people in 1977. After the demonstration turned violent, the riot police unleashed grenades which resulted in the death of one demonstration and the mutilation of another. The government refused to alter or delay their plans for the construction of the Superphénix.

         In the late 1970s, Europe was concerned with the United States dominance in nuclear technology. The EURODIF uranium enrichment consortium started a plant at Tricastin in 1979 and there was a call for a European plutonium industry. President Carter’s concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation dangers from spreading fast breeder technology were dismissed as “totally absurd.” France felt that if it could use uranium mined in France to fuel fast breeders, it could be independent of outside energy suppliers such as Saudi Arabia.

         Not all the people working of CEA shared the enthusiasm for fast breeder reactors. a two hundred and fifty page report was produced by a CEA engineer in 1982.  He concluded that “fast breeder reactors are the most complicated, the most

polluting, the most inefficient and the most ambiguous means that man has

invented to date to reduce the consumption of nuclear fuel”.

 

          The Superphénix was finished and turned on in 1985. It was intended to burn about four thousand pounds of plutonium annually but over its eleven years of operation, it burned less than twelve thousand pounds of plutonium. It experienced a number of technical problems and was shut down about half of the time. It never produced the level of electrical power that was projected in its original design. A major leak of sodium coolant at the end of 1985 was not repaired quickly because the engineering company responsible for the repair had laid off many critical staff because it was losing money. Numerous problems followed and in 1996 a major refurbishing was abandoned and the Superphénix was shut down permanently.

 

          By the mid-1980s, the enthusiasm for fast breeder reactors was fading across the globe. Global construction of reactors had peaked in 1975 at forty and, by 1986, only one reactor was being constructed. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 damaged the reputation of and support for nuclear power. In addition, the price of uranium had dropped by almost two thirds and there was a plentiful supply for global demand. This cut into the argument for the need for breeders to produce fuel.

 

          The French government was undeterred. Massive over construction of nuclear reactors resulted in excess electrical power capacity in the mid-1980s. The La Hague reprocessing plant quadrupled its reprocessing of spent fuel between 1987 and 1997. A great deal of high grade plutonium reprocessed from the French reactors was utilized in the construction of French nuclear weapons. The French government recently renewed its commitment to nuclear power despite the Fukushima disaster and the decision of Germany to totally abandon nuclear power generation. The decades long program for fast breeder reactors was very expensive for the French taxpayers and, other than nuclear weapons, was ultimately unproductive.

Superphénix reactor:

With powerful Typhoon Francisco on track for Fukushima and Typhoon Lekima developing in Pacific, there are concerns that the storms may collide and hit the east coast of Japan later in week. enenews.com

A nuclear engineer  says that pyrophoric fire may have already occurred at Fukushima Unit 4 spent fuel pool and explosion possibly due to the rods not being covered with water. enenews.com

Building a new nuclear plant for the Baltic nations is a viable way to replace power-producing capacity the region lost when Lithuania closed two Soviet-built reactors, Energy Minister Jaroslav Neverovic said. bloomberg.com

Twice this year alone, Air Force officers entrusted with the launch keys to nuclear-tipped missiles have been caught leaving open a blast door that is intended to help prevent a terrorist or other intruder from entering their underground command post, foxnews.com

Ambient office = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 129 nanosieverts per hour

Red seedless grape from Top Foods =  97 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 82 nanosieverts per hour