Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 26 January 1979:
Vol. 203. no. 4378, pp. 330 - 337
DOI: 10.1126/science.203.4378.330
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Articles

Fission Power: An Evolutionary Strategy

Harold A. Feiveson 1, Frank von Hippel 2, and Robert H. Williams 2

1 Assistant professor with a joint appointment in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Member of the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at The Center for Environmental Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
2 Senior research physicists and Members of the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at The Center for Environmental Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

Motivated by concerns about the difficulty of safeguarding the large flows of plutonium in a breeder reactor fuel cycle, we explore the resource and economic implications of a strategy in which there is no nuclear weapons-usable material in fresh reactor fuel. The strategy involves the deployment of already developed types of advanced converter reactors which, unlike the breeder, can be operated effectively on proliferation-resistant once-through fuel cycles. Advanced converter reactors could be much more uranium-efficient on once-through fuel cycles than current systems and therefore could compete economically with breeders up to very high uranium prices. If necessary, the uranium requirements of an advanced converter reactor system could be reduced much further with the recycling of isotopically denatured uranium, but any commitment to a closed fuel cycle would be unnecessary for many decades.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Radioactive waste: the problem of plutonium.
H Krugmann and F von Hippel (1980)
Science 210, 319-321
   Abstract »    PDF »
Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power.
J. Elster (1979)
Social Science Information 18, 371-400


To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)