Japan Restarts the Monju Fast Breeder Reactor

It’s encouraging to learn that Japan has decided to restart its Monju fast breeder reactor. Among other things it will supply electricity to many Japanese households without releasing greenhouse gases in the process. If global warming is really a terrible threat to all mankind, one would think we would be building such energy sources as quickly as possible. One would, however, be wrong.

For global warming alarmists, the pose is everything and the reality nothing. You can tell because they have no interest in solutions to the problem that happen to be unfashionable. Fast breeder reactors are an excellent example. They produce electricity without releasing greenhouse gases, and without releasing the particulates that kill tens of thousands of people every year, while representing a smaller radioactive hazard than coal fired plants. In that respect the pathologically pious saviors of the environment are more or less as irrational as our military. After all, the Lone Ranger only shot silver bullets. They shoot depleted uranium bullets that are worth their weight in gold as potential sources of energy. Allow me to explain.

Imagine dropping an iron ball into a deep well. What happens when it hits the bottom? It releases energy, right?  If the bottom of the well were a sheet of glass, that energy would probably cause it to shatter.  The ball releases the energy because it has been accelerated by a force. In this case, it is the force of gravity. However, there are other forces in nature. One of them is the strong nuclear force. It is vastly more powerful than gravity, but is only effective at distances on the order of the size of an atomic nucleus. At that distance, however, when an “iron ball” in the form of a neutron happens along, it can make the nucleus of a heavy element such as uranium look like a very deep well indeed. Just like a real iron ball, when the neutron falls into the well, it releases energy. If you think of the nucleus as a drop of water, that energy can cause the drop to start jiggling and stretching, just like a real drop. If the neutron releases enough energy, it can even cause the “drop of water” to break into two, smaller drops, releasing more neutrons in the process. That’s what happens in nuclear fission. The neutrons released in the process can drop into other “wells,” resulting in more fission, leading to a self-sustaining chain reaction, which can be used in controlled form to power a reactor, or in uncontrolled form to cause an atomic explosion.

When a neutron falls into a nuclear well, the energy released is only large enough to actually split certain very heavy atoms.  One of them is uranium 235, or U235 for short, which occurs in nature as 0.7% of natural uranium.  The rest is mainly uranium 238, which generally doesn’t split unless the neutron is going very fast to begin with, and therefore has some of its own energy to contribute when it falls into the well.  Another of the “fissile” heavy atoms that can split even when a slow neutron falls into its well is plutonium 239.  It can also be used to power nuclear reactors.  It doesn’t occur in any significant amounts in nature.  However, it is produced in nuclear reactors.  Interestingly enough, the “raw material” for its production is the  U238 which makes up the lion’s share of natural uranium.  When a neutron falls into a U238 “well,” the nucleus usually doesn’t split, but can capture the neutron, becoming U239.  This nucleus then releases an electron, resulting in its transmutation into neptunium 239. The neptunium nucleus, in turn, releases another electron, leaving Pu239. 

Now, if we’ve produced Pu239, and Pu239 is the fuel for nuclear reactors, we should simply be able to keep the reactor running, gradually converting the U238 to Pu239 and “burning” it right along with the naturally occurring U235, right?  Wrong!  In order to change to Pu239, U238 has to capture a neutron, but neutrons are what’s necessary to keep the nuclear chain reaction going.  Take away too many neutrons and the chain reaction stops, shutting down the reactor.  That’s where “fast breeders” come in.

Recall that, if the neutron that falls into the well is going very fast, then it can add a substantial amount of its own energy to that which is released when it falls to the bottom of the nuclear well.  In some cases that can cause even U238 to split, or fission.  More importantly, however, when such a fast neutron causes an atom of “fissile” material, such as U235 or Pu239, to split, the number of neutrons released in the process goes up.  If enough extra neutrons are released, the chain reaction can keep going even if many of them are captured by U238 to produce Pu239.  This is what makes it possible for a fast breeder reactor to produce more fuel than it consumes.  In the process, it gives us access to the massive amounts of energy locked away in the U238.  Instead of wastefully burning up the U235 in natural uranium and throwing away the rest by, say, shooting it out of gatling guns, we can now burn a large proportion of the U238 as well. 

Under the circumstances, does it make much sense for the military to be turning this potentially invaluable material into projectiles?  Apart from being a grotesque waste of a potentially valuable resource, it also releases radiation into the environment.  Granted, the amount of radiation will be very low.  It takes over four billion years for half of the atoms in a chunk of U238 to decay, and since there are many other natural sources of radiation in the environment, it is generally difficult to detect its presence above the background noise.  That fact, however, has hardly prevented legions of freeloaders and their professionally virtuous advocates from pretending that any number of ills from hangnails to heart disease are all directly caused by that radiation, and getting gullible politicians to believe it.  Apart from the waste, is it worth the grief?  I think not.

If fast breeder reactors can vastly increase the amount of energy available from the limited quantities of uranium available to us, what is the point of building more conventional reactors that waste most of the available fuel?  If global warming is really such a terrible threat to mankind, and the environmental alarmists are really more concerned about actually doing something to address the threat than in striking heroic poses from the moral high ground and pretending to do something about it, why aren’t they on board as well?  Whatever the severity of the threat of global warming, fast breeder reactors, along with solar, wind, hydroelectric, and other sources of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases could substantially end that threat.  Why, then, aren’t we building them?

Japan's Monju Fast Breeder

The Times Square Bomber: CNN Finally Gets It

After scratching its collective head for ever so long and wondering what could possibly have motivated Faisal Shahzad in his attempt to murder people who happened to be in Times Square at the wrong time, the answer is finally starting to dawn on CNN. He did it because he’s an Islamist terrorist. Who knew?! Congratulations on seeing the light, CNN. You have our deep thanks for letting the rest of us know it wasn’t because he had fallen behind in his mortgage payments, after all.