....and a happy July 4 to our friends south of the border.
Jaro
NUCLEONICS WEEK - July 4, 2002
FFTF PROPONENTS KEEP HOPE ALIVE
FOR RESTART OF LAST U.S. BREEDER
Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) advocates say there is evidence
that private companies are interested in pooling together
to keep medical isotope production going at the Hanford,
Wash. facility, which has been in standby for over a decade
and is now slated for shutdown by DOE. In fact, one supporter
said, France's Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
recently expressed an interest in partnering or establishing
some type of bilateral cooperation.
A recent study commissioned by Richland, the Port of
Benton, Benton County, and the Tri-City Industrial Development
Council found there was a market for the isotopes.
The study, conducted by the marketing consulting firm Frost and
Sullivan at a cost of $43,250, provides "totally new" information,
said Benton County Commissioner Claude Oliver, one of
the FFTF restart advocates. He said DOE has "never before
had the proposal (in the study) to review and reject."
Oliver said the FFTF proponents are racing against the
clock to get DOE to look at its proposal. The breeder reactor
is due to have the sodium drained by the end of the year or
early next year. But the bigger looming deadline is budget
considerations. The government already is budgeting money
to permanently close the facility.
Oliver said the local governments have established a community
reuse agency to save the reactor, and have been in
touch with Vice President Dick Cheney's office about the project.
The savings for reusing the reactor would reach into the
hundreds of millions, Oliver said. He said DOE estimates for
the closure costs could reach $1.3-billion or more.
How the reactor's operations would be funded is still
unclear. Oliver said the plan being pursued is to have DOE
lease the facility to a private entity. But some government
funds would be needed to operate the facility, at least at first.
While France's CEA has a "scientific interest" in the
FFTF, as one of only a few remaining fast reactor R&D facilities
in the world, it is not in a position to help finance the
reactor's revival, sources close to the CEA said last week.
The CEA has a long history of fast reactor development
and operates its own pilot breeder reactor, Phenix, which is
expected to restart late this year or early next after a long
reconstruction program. In that context, said an informed
source, the CEA has expressed its interest to the U.S. DOE in
cooperative research programs involving FFTF.
The need for fast reactor research facilities has increased
with the possibility of advanced fuel cycles supporting partitioning
and transmutation, for which the fast neutron spectrum
is more efficient than thermal reactors, noted a French
official. The CEA and other French partners are participating
in the DOE-led Generation IV International Forum, which is
looking into the advanced fuel cycles.
But the CEA won't invest in reviving FFTF, as a local
government-sponsored committee around the Washington
state facility has requested, the official said. "It's not the
CEA's role" to finance foreign facilities, he noted, suggesting
that the promoters of the idea might not be familiar with the French agency.
FFTF, Phenix, and Japan's Monju, which hasn't operated
since a leak of secondary sodium in 1995, are the world's
only medium-size fast reactor R&D facilities. If revival of
FFTF proves unfeasible, one French official suggested, "we
have to invent something else" to continue advanced fuel
cycle research. Phenix, which first started up in 1973, is
scheduled to operate for only four more years once it's re-started.
-Jenny Weil, Washington and Ann MacLachlan, Paris