Clinton’s Anti-Nuclear Administration helped get us into the energy crunch we are currently in!

The truth is, the US was working on a technology 15 years ago, that the Clinton Administration killed! We could be generating significant energy now from a technology that the Clinton Administration canceled back in 1994!

Back in 1990, I went to work for the Idaho National Laboratory, then known as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. I am an optical physicist, not a nuclear physicist, so I can’t claim to be an expert, but I do know enough to understand the basics of nuclear energy. When I first went to work for the Idaho National Laboratory, I knew scientists and engineers who were involved with state-of-the-art reactor design, and they were working on a new class of reactor which was modular in design and inherently safe. Following is a brief summary of the work that was being done at the time and why we do not have this type of technology now.

Back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Argonne National Laboratory was conducting research and design of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) or sometimes called the Integral Fast Breeder Reactor (IFBR). This design was an extension of research they had been doing at their Argonne West facility at the Idaho National Laboratory in their Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) power plant reactor. The design they were developing had the following features:

·    Modular design – a new power plant would purchase one or several IFR modules according to the size of the power plant being constructed.

·    IFR modules would have a lifetime of maybe 20 to 30 years.

·    IFR modules would be loaded with fuel once – only at the beginning.

·    IFR modules would breed and re-process their own fuel for the total length of their life.

·    In the breeding and re-processing of their fuel, they would burn up all the long-lived transuranic radioactive elements, leaving only short-lived radioactive waste. Some of this could be reprocessed for medical applications. The rest could be disposed of safely (buried) for a short period of time (a couple hundred years as opposed to thousands of years) until all the short-lived elements were gone.

·    The IFR modules were being designed to passively SCRAM or shut themselves down if they lost coolant or heated up to quickly. This would eliminate all chances of having a reactor meltdown. The reactor was inherently safe.

·    The IFR modules also were designed so that it was virtually impossible to use one to obtain bomb-grade material from it.

In the early 1990’s, the IFR modular reactors were only 5 or 10 years from being put into production. If research had continued on these, we could be generating much of our power using clean nuclear energy, We also could be selling these modules around the world to help with other countries’ energy needs. We could have been well on our way to energy independence.

Unfortunately, the short-sighted, anti-nuclear Clinton administration shut down this research and started decommissioning the EBR-II research reactor. This put us 10 to 15 years behind the research capable of bringing us energy independence. An article on Wikipedia states:

One design of fast neutron reactor, specifically designed to address the waste disposal and plutonium issues, was the Integral Fast Reactor (also known as an Integral Fast Breeder Reactor, although the original reactor was designed to not breed a net surplus of fissile material).^[2][3]

To solve the waste disposal problem, the IFR had an on-site electrowinning fuel reprocessing unit that recycled the uranium and all the transuranics (not just plutonium) via electroplating, leaving just short half-life fission products in the waste. Some of these fission products could later be separated for industrial or medical uses and the rest sent to a waste repository (where they would not have to be stored for anywhere near as long as wastes containing long half-life transuranics). It is thought that it would not be possible to divert fuel from this reactor to make bombs, as several of the transuranics spontaneously undergo fission so rapidly that any assembly would melt before it could be completed. The project was canceled in 1994, at the behest of then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary.

       quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor

            their references: 2 & 3 are

2 - http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/

3 - National Policy Analysis #378: Integral Fast Reactors: Source of Safe, Abundant, Non-Polluting Power - December 2001