My Letter to the President Concerning Climate Change and the Integral Fast Reactor

May 11, 2012

The Honorable Barack H. Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC  20500

Climate Change and the Integral Fast Reactor

Dear President Obama:

I write as a private citizen on behalf of myself and my grandson, Cavanagh, age 4, and his sister or brother whose arrival is anticipated this fall.

I believe that today civilization is facing its greatest threat ever in the form of climate change.  The principal cause is industrialization’s reliance for energy on fossil fuels, which emit climate-changing greenhouse gases.  The principal cure is a revolutionary new climate-stabilizing source of energy called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).  The advantages of this technology are summarized in my one-page attachment to this letter.

Forty-seven years ago President Johnson was warned by his science advisors that fossil fuel emissions could cause “uncontrollable” changes in climate—and he so warned Congress.  Climate change is a global problem, of course, but the United States was then, as now, the leader of the free world community.  It also happens to be the leader in climate change; its emissions of the most persistent greenhouse gas over the last century and a half are three times those of any other country.  The United States should, therefore, be leading the world in a global response to climate change.  Instead, it is doing, and has done, nothing.

Churchill said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.  For my grandchildren’s sake, I hope that’s true, but my reading of history leads me to believe that doing the right thing always requires strong political leadership.  It took all of FDR’s skill and commitment to prepare an isolationist-minded country for World War II; still, extension of the peacetime draft just four months before Pearl Harbor passed the House by only one vote.  Preparing a conservative-minded country for a change to climate-stabilizing energy sources requires equal skill and commitment.

Climatologist James Hansen wrote you (as President-elect) with three recommendations: phase out coal-fired power plants that don’t capture and store carbon emissions; enact a rising tax on fossil fuels with proceeds refunded to consumers; and fast-track the R&D of 4th-generation nuclear power such as the IFR.  Last fall serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch suggested (in a letter to your assistant Heather Zichal) that you meet with Charles Till, former director of IFR development at Argonne National Laboratory.  I write to add my grandchildren’s voices and my own to theirs: IFR is the key to stabilizing the climate.

Sincerely,

Attachment: Integral Fast Reactor

Nuclear power systems create heat through nuclear fission for steam turbines to generate electricity.  The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a nuclear power system developed at the US Argonne National Laboratory that replenishes, recycles, refines and fabricates its unique metallic fuel and meets all five criteria for 4th-generation nuclear power listed below.

1.   Reduce the volume and toxicity of nuclear waste.

Existing nuclear light water reactors (LWRs) use only one percent of their uranium fuel and leave vast amounts of radioactive spent fuel including plutonium as toxic waste to be sequestered for multiple thousands of years.  IFR pyroprocessing recycles its spent fuel until all the longest-lasting radioactive elements have been used up.  Its much smaller amount of much less toxic waste needs to be sequestered for only 300 years.  Pyroprocessing can also recycle LWR spent fuel for IFR use.

2.   Keep nuclear materials unsuitable for direct use in weapons.

Nuclear fission weapons use uranium (as at Hiroshima) or plutonium (Nagasaki).  While weapons-grade uranium has to be enriched to increase its fissile isotope, U-235, from under one percent of natural uranium to more than 80 percent, weapons-grade plutonium can be chemically separated from the uranium that breeds it.  But in electro-refining during IFR pyroprocessing, plutonium is mixed with other elements that make it unsuitable for weapons.

3.   Be passively safe based on characteristics inherent in the reactor design and materials.

Because its fuel is a solid metallic alloy, IFR responds automatically to overheating caused by loss of coolant flow (as at Chernobyl) or output heat sink (Three Mile Island, Fukushima) by slowing or shutting down its reactor power.  Overheating causes metal fuel in core assemblies to expand, thereby increasing reactor size by a miniscule amount but enough to increase neutron leakage that reduces reactivity and overheating.  Other features—liquid sodium metal coolant with high boiling temperature; large sodium-filled reactor pool resisting the temperature increase; and the weak effect in metal fuel of a natural (stored Doppler) tendency to increase reactivity—provide the time and safety margins for the thermal expansion to take effect.  The metal fuel also has a low melting temperature; when all else fails, it will start melting and then disperse, reducing reactivity.

4.   Provide a long-term energy source not limited by resources.

By recycling its used uranium fuel and the plutonium fuel that it breeds from uranium, IFR increases the productivity of mineable uranium a hundred-fold.  (Plutonium, a natural element like uranium, has to be bred from uranium since it has no mineable sources.)  If IFR or a similar breeder supplied all of the world’s needs for electricity, uranium supplies could last as long as the planet.  Thus IFR is as “renewable” an energy source as solar, wind, water and geothermal.

5.   Be economically competitive with other electricity sources.

Since IFR’s systems are small, simple and designed for remote manufacturing, its capital costs should be competitive.  If the cost of waste storage are accounted for in the operating costs of LWRs and the negative externalities of greenhouse gases, toxic emissions and non-conventional mining in fossil fuel plants, IFR should be a runaway winner.  Its 24/7 availability wherever steam turbines can operate should make it competitive with solar, wind, water and geothermal power.

In 1994 Congress upheld the President’s termination of IFR development as “unnecessary.”

References: Yoon I. Chang, “Advanced Nuclear System for the 21st Century” (2002), http://www.ipd.anl.gov/anlpubs/2002/04/42922.pdf; Charles E. Till, “Plentiful Energy and the IFR Story” (2005), http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0509till.html; and Till and Chang, Plentiful Energy: The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor (2011), ISBN 978-1466384606.  (Revised 6/17/12)

The Silver Bullet for Climate Stabilizationo

In 1994, the Clinton administration induced Congress to terminate development of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) at Argonne National Laboratory, describing it as unnecessary, and told its developers to shut up about it.  Thus a technology that has been called the silver bullet we need to stop global warming disappeared into a memory hole.

What is this technology about?

As World War II ended, the US started researching civilian uses of nuclear fission, specifically to heat water for steam turbines that generate electricity.  The research proceeded on two tracks: (1) “thermal” reactors that consume their fission fuel—uranium enriched by increasing the proportion of its “fissile” (readily fissionable) isotope, U‑235, from less than one percent to about four percent; and (2) breeder reactors that optionally replenish their fission fuel— plutonium bred from the “fertile” isotope, U-238, that comprises 99 percent of natural uranium.  While thermal reactors create plutonium as a byproduct and fission it, plutonium is the primary fission fuel of breeder reactors while uranium is their breeding fuel.

Thermal reactors “moderate” the speed of the neutrons created by fission because slow neutrons do a better job at fissioning U-235 than fast neutrons.  Breeder reactors don’t moderate because fast neutrons produce more (fast) neutrons in fissioning plutonium than slow neutrons do and accordingly produce a higher breeding ratio.  Of the neutrons produced by a fission, all but the one that is needed to perpetuate the fission chain reaction are potentially available for breeding, which occurs when U‑238 “captures“ a neutron and becomes (through transmutation) fissile plutonium Pu‑239.

What emerged as the standard for commercial nuclear power was the “2^nd generation” thermal Light Water Reactor (LWR), the first of which was installed at Shippingport, PA in 1957.  LWR uses uranium oxide as a fuel and light (ordinary) water as both a coolant and a moderator.  Today more than 350 commercial reactors are operating in 27 countries, including 100 in the US that produce 20 percent of the electricity.

Meanwhile, breeder development continued at Argonne.  In 1964 the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) started up to test what eventually became the IFR and kept going for 30 years.  Instead of a water coolant, IFR uses liquid metal sodium, which doesn’t moderate neutron speed.  As a fission fuel it settled on a solid metal alloy consisting of uranium enriched with plutonium and mixed with zirconium in something like a 70-20-10% ratio, with uranium used by itself as a fertile “blanket” around the fuel assemblies when IFR is operating as a breeder.

The choice of metal fuel is unique among current “4^th generation” breeder technologies and has important advantages.  Foremost among them is its inherent safety, which in the last analysis means not letting any radiation escape into the outside world.

Metal expands when heated by fission, and when it gets too hot the expansion allows more neutrons to run away, thus “passively” reducing or even stopping fission and lowering the temperature.  In public tests conducted in 1986, neither loss of the internal coolant flow nor loss of the heat sink transferring heat to the steam turbine—the causes of all three of the operating LWR accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima—made EBR-II fail.  Given “a couple of chances to melt down” and release radiation, as one of the nuclear engineers commented, “It politely refused both times.”

Another advantage is pyroprocessing, IFR’s technique for reprocessing its metal fuel and fuel assemblies through standard electro refining to cleanse them of impure fission products.  Performed remotely in a highly radioactive “hot cell” that no one can enter, electro refining mixes the reprocessed fuel in a mixture that makes the plutonium element too impure for use in weapons.  Thus, unlike oxide fuel reprocessing, pyroprocessing poses no risk of nuclear proliferation.

The slow process in IFR operations is breeding—upwards of a decade is needed for an IFR reactor to produce enough surplus plutonium to start up another IFR reactor.  Which raises the question, where will the first commercial IFR reactors get their start-up plutonium?  Although it’s a natural element like uranium, plutonium has no mineable sources.

Bit LWRs have left a large amount of radioactive spent fuel containing plutonium that’s waiting to be buried in some tomb like Yucca Mountain NV for hundreds of thousands of years.  And what’s toxic waste to the LWR is potential fuel to the IFR.  With the addition of a facility to reduce oxide fuel to metal, pyroprocessing can reprocess it and save the US government hundreds of million dollars a year in waste handling costs.

Counting both the uranium that is “depleted” by stripping it of the U-235 that enriches LWR fuel and the fuel itself, LWRs use only one percent of the uranium they mine.  IFR, by contrast, keeps reprocessing its fuel until all of the longest-lasting radioactive elements including plutonium are used up, leaving a much smaller amount of much less toxic waste that needs to be sequestered for only 300 years.  And since depleted uranium is still fertile, IFR can use it, too.

While uranium resources are plentiful, they’re not unlimited.  But IFR extracts a hundred times more energy out of uranium than LWRs.  If IFR reactors supplied all of the world’s electricity needs, uranium would last as long as the planet.  In this sense IFR is as “renewable” an energy source as solar, wind, water and geothermal power.

The economics of IFR as a base load power producer have yet to be established.  But given the intermittence and geographic limitations of these alternative non-carbon energy sources, and the high cost of LWR waste, IFR should be very competitive.  And compared to fossil fuel power, if the negative externalities of their greenhouse gases and toxic emissions are properly accounted for, IFR should be like Secretariat at the Belmont in 1973—a runaway winner.

IFR generates power safely and efficiently and is the key to climate stabilization.  The problem is political: how do we get it back on track?