Don Klipstein wrote:
In article , Jim Yanik wrote:
(Don Klipstein) wrote in
:
Plutonium comes from breeder reactors.
Not all of it.
Most nuclear power plants are not breeder reactors.
No,but the spent fuel rods still contain usable amounts of PU.
I do remember from back in the late 1970's and around 1980 that the
anti-nukers complained even-more against breeder reactors on basis that
those made plutonium useful for making bombs and non-breeder ones did not.
Are non-breeders safe in this respect or is another old lie by 1970's
anti-nukers being exposed now?
If not a lie, certainly a leading omission of "the rest of the story".
Pu is generated by neutron capture. As noted before, the real
difference between a breeder reactor and an "ordinary" reactor is that
the breeder includes material specifically for this capture and by that
inclusion the overall fuel cycle ends up w/ more _total_ fissile
material than was in the initial fuel loading -- hence the term
breeder--it "bred" fuel. In a non-breeder, that extra material isn't
there, so overall more fissile material is consumed than generated (or
in some cases the "breeding ratio" might approach unity).
The initial commercial LWR fuel cycles in the US were designed with the
thought we would have reprocessing facilities available to make use of
what fissile Pu was produced, but under Carter the NRC was told to not
consider the licensing application of GE for their proposed reprocessing
plant, thus leaving us in the present mess of an "open" instead of
"closed" fuel cycle and the problem of spent fuel storage. This
decision was based on his (Carter's) apparent inability to distinguish
intellectually between commercial and weapons-grade material and his
overly optimistic hope that by setting the example in the US of not
recycling would somehow be influential in other nations' decisions as to
whether they would or would not reprocess fuel on their own. As is
clear, it didn't do anything at all to discourage others and did quite a
lot of harm to our own ability to efficiently use our own resources. We
seem to do a lot of that sort of thing (draw weapon, shoot self in foot,
that is).
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