New nuclear reactor type 20 times more efficent - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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China had so much industry due to the fact they have cheapest electricity, mostly from CO2 emmiting coal

"Cheap" is not an adjective normally used for fast reactors. They are "efficient" in terms of the amount of uranium you have to put into them, but they have turned out to be unreliable and expensive to run when they've been tried.

Titled "Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status," the IPFM report concludes: "The problems (with fast breeder reactors) ... make it hard to dispute Admiral Hyman Rickover's summation in 1956, based on his experience with a sodium-cooled reactor developed to power an early U.S. nuclear submarine, that such reactors are 'expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.'"

Plagued by high costs, often multi-year downtime for repairs (including a 15-year reactor restart delay in Japan), multiple safety problems (among them often catastrophic sodium fires triggered simply by contact with oxygen), and unresolved proliferation risks, "fast breeder" reactors already have been the focus of more than $50 billion in development spending, including more than $10 billion each by the U.S., Japan and Russia. As the IPFM report notes: "Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is anywhere near economically competitive with light-water reactors ... After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries."
...
Mycle Schneider, Paris, international consultant on energy and nuclear policy, said: "France built with Superphenix, the only commercial-size plutonium fueled breeder reactor in nuclear history. After an endless series of very costly technical, legal and safety problems it was shut down in 1998 with one of the worst operating records in nuclear history."

Thomas B. Cochran, nuclear physicist and senior scientist in the Nuclear Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: "Fast reactor development programs failed in the: 1) United States; 2) France; 3) United Kingdom; 4) Germany; 5) Japan; 6) Italy; 7) Soviet Union/Russia 8) U.S. Navy and 9) the Soviet Navy. The program in India is showing no signs of success and the program in China is only at a very early stage of development. Despite the fact that fast breeder development began in 1944, now some 65 year later, of the 438 operational nuclear power reactors worldwide, only one of these, the BN-600 in Russia, is a commercial-size fast reactor and it hardly qualifies as a successful breeder. The Soviet Union/Russia never closed the fuel cycle and has yet to fuel BN-600 with plutonium."

M.V. Ramana, Ph.D., visiting research scholar, Woodrow Wilson School and the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, Princeton University, said: "Along with Russia, India is one of only two countries that are currently constructing commercial scale breeder reactors. Both the history of the program and the economic and safety features of the reactor suggest, however, that the program will not fulfill the promises with which it was begun and is being pursued. Breeder reactors have always underpinned the DAE's claims about generating large quantities of cheap electricity necessary for development. Today, more than five decades after those plans were announced, that promise is yet to be fulfilled. As elsewhere, breeder reactors are likely to be unsafe and costly, and their contribution to overall electricity generation will be modest at best."

http://fissilematerials.org/blog/2010/0 ... f_fas.html

Allison MacFarlane, former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recently made this sarcastic assessment of fast reactor technology: “These turn out to be very expensive technologies to build. Many countries have tried over and over. What is truly impressive is that these many governments continue to fund a demonstrably failed technology.”

https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/


Even a conference for the advocates recognised the problems:

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the potential boost that fast reactor systems operating in a fully closed cycle offer to nuclear fuel efficiency and waste management—and their implications for sustainability—is widely recognized, and active development continues in many countries on reactor, coolant, fuel, and fuel-cycle technologies. At a June 2017 conference that the agency hosted for the world’s fast reactor and related fuel-cycle community in Russia (the proceedings of which were released last December), a vast array of demonstration projects, ranging from small to large-scale, were reported to be under study, design, and construction.
...
While the proceedings showed general optimism about the future of fast reactors, several speakers recognized challenges that could hamper the progress of fast reactors. The IAEA said, for example, “To achieve the full potential of fast neutron reactors, reaching a real breakthrough in the utilization of nuclear energy, the research and technology developments will have to demonstrate the fulfillment of modern criteria of economic competitiveness, stringent safety and security requirements, sustainable development, proliferation resistance and public acceptance.”

According to Chetal, the quest for better economics is hampered by a dearth of information because only SFRs have so far been built for demonstration and commercial purposes. “The technology viability of SFRs has been well-demonstrated in experimental and demonstration reactors. However, the economic competitiveness of SFR has not been well-proved yet,” he noted. “The perceived higher cost of SFRs compared with [light water reactors (LWRs)] has impeded its growth. The economic comparison of SFR versus LWR has strong linkages with the [low] cost of uranium, which presently puts pressure on SFRs to look for ways and means to improve on capital cost, construction time, and capacity factor,” he said.

https://www.powermag.com/rapid-advancem ... -reactors/

These are all assessments by people in the nuclear industry, not those against any kind of nuclear power. The UK's trial with a fast reactor, Dounreay, was an expensive farce. Over 20 years, The lifetime load factor recorded by the IAEA was 26.9%..

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