ALL civillian reactors are breeder reactors
I guess I should modify my list so that ANYTHING that is vented must pass through the Executive Suites. Also, the cited site is in Central Australia well away from any available sea-water.
I should also add an underground shuttle train to take staff from quarters to work. This would have an inbuilt safety mode of auto-reverse and take-you-back-home if there were a critical event, along with appropriate blast doors. The idea is to operate it like an oil rig such that staff are there for three months at a time.
Breeder reactors ultimately produce weaponry materials. In a world that has gotten over the Cold War and is hopefully getting past the MAD (Mutally Assured Destruction) mentality, I would like to see all such reactors decommissioned as quickly as possible.
The way the u.s. has been carelessly throwing DUWs around Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm wondering how long it will take before someone in the International Community orders the u.s. to go back and clean up the mess they've made.
ALL civillian pressurized water reactors are breeders. It works like this ... the useful isotopes of Uranium are U233 and U235. By useful I mean fissionable. There is virtually no 233, and there is about .7% 235. The rest is isotope 238. Because all of these isotopes are 100% identical CHEMICALLY, the only difference is weight, and that is a very slight difference. In order to make reactor fuel, the Uranium must be enriched. The enrichment process is very difficult because the only property available to separate out the isotopes is the slight difference in weight. Uranium is a heavy metal with a very high melting point and a much higher boiling point, and, in order to separate out the 235, it must be a gas. The answer is to convert the Uranium to a compound that is gaseous at temperatures reasonable enough to work with. That compound is Uranium hexafluoride, or UF6. UF6 is a highly corrosive gas. In order to work with that, a new compound had to be developed that would contain it. That compound or family of compounds are well known and in wide use today ... its called teflon.
Anyways ... to make a Uranium bomb, the Uranium 235 has to be enriched up to around 97%. Navy reactors use Uranium 235 enriched to that percentage as well ... there simply is no room onboard a submarine for a reactor that uses the low grade fuel a civillian power plant uses, which is Uranium that is enriched to 1 to 2%, the balance being U238. U238 is also known as "depleted Uranium". It is a very heavy, dense metal with a high melting point. It is both chemically toxic to the human body as well as being an alpha particle emitter. Alpha particles, or helium nuclei, are the least penetrating, being stopped easily by a sheet of paper, but, they are the most damaging if ingested or breathed in. U238 has an extremely long half life, in the billions of years I believe. That means it is extremely persistent in the environment. It also means that its decay rate is pretty slow.
Back to reactors and U238 ... U238 will absorb a neutron and become Neptunium, which converts almost immediately to Plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,000 years and atomic number 94 and is a FAR better substance for nuclear weapons and is way, way, way easier to manufacture than U235. U235 is much better for a reactor because it is far easier to control. But the lower enriched fuel in a civillian plant, because of all the 238, will breed plutonium regardless. A civillian plant is brought up to full power over a period of weeks and is then operated for about a year and then requires a shutdown to refuel. Towards the end of life for a civillian reactor core, a significant percentage of the heat produced from the core is from the fissioning of plutonium. The greater the percentage of power derived from the plutonium, the less stable. Why is that????????? In order for a reactor to stay at power, each generation of neutrons must replace the previous generation. The fissioning of U235 produces a wide range of fission products, virtually the entire spectrum of elements, plus some neutrons which continue the chain reaction. Some of the isotopes produced in turn release neutrons. They are known as DELAYED neutrons. If the reactor is critical, it is critical on these delayed neutrons, giving a generation a 57 second time frame. This makes a U235 fueled reactor core controllable, whereas Plutonium is critical on PROMPT neutrons, also known as PROMPT CRITICALITY. In prompt criticality, the generation time is measured in microseconds. The smaller the fraction of delayed neutrons, the closer the core is to prompt criticality, and the less stable.
There IS another way to go with breeder reactors ... U233 breeders that convert Thorium into Uranium 233 that has pretty much all of the advantages of 235. The separation of the 233 from Thorium can be done chemically, and the 233 can then be made into a reactor core that does NOT produce Plutonium. But for whatever reason this is a tech that although known about has never really been promoted or developed.
Another thing not often heard about these days is the possibility of fusion reactors, which would fuse hydrogen into helium to produce power. What little is heard is about huge plants that would use a zillion lasers or the magnetic containment of plasma, etc. What you DON'T hear about is the so-called "cold" fusion, bubble fusion, etc. There HAS been some promising results, BUT ... these technologies would lead to cheap and plentiful power production that would tend to be DECENTRALIZED. That is the political side of it ... control. Any tech that would decentralize power production and reduce the price of a megawatt-hour, now traded at about 30 to 40 dollars and retailing for about 120 to 140 dollars to, say, a few cents or a few tens of cents ... would overturn the electrical power distribution industry, destroy most of the demand for crude oil, coal, and natural gas, and allow for economical desalinization of water and therefore as much food production as needed ... the powers that be would definitely have a vested interest in supressing that technology until they could figure out a way to control it in their own best interests.
Pete
