"Fast breeder" reactors destined to fail.

• Position: Nuclear Energy

Hopes that the "fast breeder"--a plutonium-fueled nuclear reactor designed to produce more fuel than it consumes--might serve as a major part of the long-term nuclear waste disposal solution are not merited by the dismal track record to date of such sodium-cooled reactors in India, France, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., insists a study from the International Panel on Fissile Materials, Princeton, N.J.

The 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."

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Plagued by high costs, often multiyear 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 $50,000,000,000 in development spending, including over $10,000,000,000 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."

With a...