reactor that could produce more plutonium than it consumed (dubbed a "breeder reactor") was first raised during World War II by scientists in the U.S. atomic bomb program. They were concerned that uranium 235, the rare chainreacting isotope that fuels today's nuclear reactors, was insufficiently abundant on Earth to support a large-scale deployment of nuclear power. Over the next 20 years, Britain, France, Germany, India, Japan, and the Soviet Union followed the United States in establishing national plutonium breeder reactor programs. (Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands joined the French and German programs as partners.) In all of these programs, the main driver was the hope of solving the long-term energy-supply problem by deploying large numbers of nuclear power reactors. In "Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status," a new report by the International Panel on Fissile Materials, experiences with fast breeder reactors in six countries are examined. 1 These studies make clear that the assumptions driving the pursuit of breeder reactors for the past six decades have proven to be wrong. False assumptions. The rationale for pursuing breeder reactors was based on the following key assumptions (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit): (1) Uranium is scarce, and high-grade deposits would quickly become depleted if light water nuclear reactors, which do not breed more fuel than they consume, were deployed on a large scale; (2) breeder reactors would quickly become economically competitive with light water reactors (the dominant reactor
Motivated by concerns about the difficulty of safeguarding the large flows of plutonium in a breeder reactor fuel cycle, we explore the resource and economic implications of a strategy in which there is no nuclear weapons-usable material in fresh reactor fuel. The strategy involves the deployment of already developed types of advanced converter reactors which, unlike the breeder, can be operated effectively on proliferation-resistant once-through fuel cycles. Advanced converter reactors could be much more uranium-efficient on once-through fuel cycles than current systems and therefore could compete economically with breeders up to very high uranium prices. If necessary, the uranium requirements of an advanced converter reactor system could be reduced much further with the recycling of isotopically denatured uranium, but any commitment to a closed fuel cycle would be unnecessary for many decades.
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