The panelists expect new nuclear plants to take the form of small modular reactors and, eventually, fast breeder reactors.
FORBES: The Nuclear Renaissance Is Back, Industry Panel Says
And the result is, as you suggested, that India now gets to produce an unlimited amount of fissile material from something called fast breeder reactors, and please don't ask me what that means.
With plutonium no longer needed for use in the world's abandoned fast breeder reactor programmes and nuclear powers getting rid of their atomic weapons, large stockpiles of the highly toxic plutonium metal are starting to build up.
Japan has been developing fast-breeder technology for decades in the hopes of making itself energy independent.
In December 1995, the Monju fast-breeder reactor at Tsuruga sprang a leak in its sodium-cooling circuitry.
And the fast-breeder type of nuclear reactor in which plutonium was used as fuel is no longer economic.
On top of all this, the new government announced ambitious plans on May 25th to build 40 new fast-breeder nuclear-power stations in Russia over the next 30 years.
In the 1970s and 1980s the federal government poured billions of dollars into the Synthetic Fuels Corporation to develop liquid and gas fuel from coal, and into the fast-breeder nuclear reactor.
What they failed to appreciate, and what the company failed to tell them, was that a fast-breeder uses fuel that has a 19% concentration of the fissile isotope of uranium, 235U. Ordinary nuclear reactors use fuel containing around 3% of the fissile isotope.
The answer lies in its plant for reprocessing spent fuel, built partly to take used fuel from Germany and Japan (which largely paid for its construction) and partly to produce the plutonium that was once expected to be needed as fuel for fast-breeder reactors, in Britain and elsewhere.
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