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.

Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States have abandoned their breeder reactor development programs. Despite the arguments by France’s nuclear conglomerate Areva, that fast-neutron reactors will ultimately fission all the plutonium building up in France’s light-water reactor spent fuel,18 France’s only operating fast-neutron reactor, Phenix, was disconnected from the grid in March 2009 and scheduled for permanent shutdown by the end of that year.19 The Superphenix, the world’s first commercial-sized breeder reactor, was abandoned in 1998 and is being decommissioned. There is no follow-on breeder reactor planned in France for at least a decade.

Japan’s Monju reactor operated for only a year before it was shut down by an accident in 1995 and it had not resumed operation as of the end of 2009. There are plans for a new demonstration reactor by 2025 and commercialization of breeder reactors by 2050 but there is reason to doubt these projections. Japan’s Government is not willing to kill its breeder program entirely, because, as in France, the breeder is still the ultimate justification for Japan’s spent fuel reprocessing program. For decades, however, the Japanese Government has been reducing funding for its breeder program and shifting commercialization further and further into the future (see chapter 4).

Russia and India are building demonstration breeder reactors. In both cases, however, their breeder (and spent fuel reprocessing) programs leave much to be desired regarding the availability of data on reliability, safety and economics. In the case of India, there is also the potential for use of breeder reactors to produce plutonium for weapons. The high costs of commercial breeder reactors and an international Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty that bans production of fissile materials for weapons will force some of these issues into the open and foster new debates about the value of these breeder programs.

In the United States, during the G. W. Bush Administration, fast reactors returned to the agenda as "burner" reactors. In an initiative started in 2006 labeled "The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)," the U. S. Department of Energy proposed that sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors be used to make the radioactive waste in spent reactor fuel more manageable. With the removal of the uranium blankets around their cores, fast-neutron reactors would, like light-water reactors, breed less fissile material than they burned. The high-energy neutron spectrum of the sodium-cooled reactors would be more effective, however, in fissioning the non-chain-reacting isotopes of plutonium and minor transuranic elements. Already in 1996, however, a National Academy of Sciences assessment commissioned by the U. S. Department of Energy, had concluded that such an effort would have very high costs and marginal benefits and would take hundreds of years of recycling to reduce the global inventory of transuranic isotopes by 99 percent.20 The Obama Administration and the U. S. Congress share this skepticism and propose a new research and development program to investigate alternative strategies for managing U. S. spent fuel.21

The breeder reactor dream is not dead but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating by now. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the legacy of the dream; approximately 250 tons of separated weapon-usable plutonium and ongoing — although, in some cases struggling — reprocessing programs in France, India, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom.

kg corresponding to less than 0.1 cents per kWh. Operations and maintenance would add approximately 1.5 cents/kWh. Finally, for a light-water reactor costing $4000/KWe operating at a 90 percent capacity factor the capital charge would be 5 cents/kWh, assuming a 10 percent capital charge; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Future of Nuclear Power, An MIT Interdisciplinary Study (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), Appendix 5A.

This figure is based on figure 5 of Matthew Bunn, Steve Fetter, John Holdren and Bob van der Zwaan, "The Economics of Reprocessing Versus Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel," Nuclear Technology 150 (June 2005): 209. It has been updated by Steve Fetter through 2006 and the author through 2007 (average U. S. price) and 2008 and early 2009 (spot price) based on U. S. Energy Information Administration, "Average Price and Quantity for Uranium Purchased by Owners and Operators of U. S. Civilian Nuclear Power Reactors by Pricing Mechanisms and Delivery Year," <http://www. eia. doe. gov/cneaf/nuclear/umar/table5.html> (accessed 15 September 2009); and Uranium Intelligence Weekly respectively.

From International Energy Agency R&D Statistics Database, <http://www. iea. org/Textbase/stats/rd. asp> (accessed 15 September 2009). Unavailable values have been replaced with zeros.

Matthew Bunn et al., op. cit., 209. For example, for utility financing at a 10 percent discount rate, central values for reprocessing and breeder core fabrication of $1000 and $1500 per kg of heavy metal respectively, and only a small capital cost difference between light-water reactors and breeders of $200/KWe (5 percent of current light-water reactor capital costs), the breakeven uranium price would be $340 per kg — far greater than projected prices even if nuclear power grows substantially in the coming decades.

Since the sodium slows the neutrons somewhat, its removal increases reactivity since both the fission probability of plutonium-239 and the number of neutrons released per fission increase with neutron energy. The only way to offset this positive reactivity feedback from loss of coolant is to design the core geometry so that leakage of neutrons out of the fuel region of the core increases as the sodium is lost. This requires either that the core be pancake shaped or that neutron absorbing blanket fuel assemblies be dispersed among the fuel assemblies.

H. A. Bethe and J. H. Tait, "An Estimate of the Order of Magnitude of the Explosion When the Core of a Fast Reactor Collapses," UKAEA-RHM 56 (1956).

Alexander Glaser and M. V. Ramana, "Weapon-grade Plutonium Production Potential in the Indian Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor," Science and Global Security 15 (2007): 85-105.

The National Energy Policy Development Group, "Report of Vice President Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task force," 5-21. See also U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology, "Report to Congress on Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative: The Future Path for Advanced Spent Fuel Treatment and Transmutation Research", (2003).

Robert Hill, Argonne National Laboratory, "Advanced Fuel Cycle Systems: Recycle/Refabrication Technology Status," September 2005. See also, E. D. Collins, Oak Ridge, "Closing the Fuel Cycle can Extend the Lifetime of the High-Level-Waste Repository," American Nuclear Society, 2005 Winter Meeting, Washington, DC; and, Jungmin Kang and Frank von Hippel, "Limited Proliferation Resistance Benefits from Recycling Unseparated Transuranics and Lanthanides from Light-water Reactor Spent Fuel," Science and Global Security 13 (2005): 169.

Areva is reprocessing France’s low-enriched uranium fuel and recycling the plutonium into mixed-oxide (MOX, uranium-plutonium) fuel for light — water reactors. The spent MOX fuel contains approximately two thirds as much plutonium as the fresh MOX fuel but the plutonium contains an increased fraction of the even isotopes, plutonium-238, plutonium-240 and plutonium-242, that are difficult to fission in thermal reactors. The spent MOX fuel therefore is being stored in the hopes that fast-neutron reactors will eventually be built that can fission all the plutonium isotopes efficiently.

Mycle Schneider, Steve Thomas, Antony Froggatt and Doug Koplow, "World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009," (August 2009), 101.

Committee on Separations Technology and Transmutation Systems, National Research Council, Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separation and Transmutation (Washington, D. C: National Academies Press, 1996).

In June 2009, the U. S. Department of Energy announced that it was cancelling development of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement because it was no longer pursuing domestic commercial reprocessing.