Breeder Reactor - Future Plants

Future Plants

An indigenous FBR is under construction in India, and is due to be completed in 2012. The commissioning date should be known by mid year. The FBR program of India includes the concept of using fertile thorium-232 to breed fissile uranium-233. India is also pursuing the thorium thermal breeder reactor. A thermal breeder is not possible with purely uranium/plutonium based technology. Thorium fuel is the strategic direction of the power program of India, owing to their large reserves of thorium, but worldwide known reserves of thorium are also some four times those of uranium. India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) says that it will simultaneously construct four more breeder reactors of 500 MWe each including two at Kalpakkam.

The China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR), scheduled for completion in 2008, is a 25 MW(e) prototype for the planned China Prototype Fast Reactor (CFRP). It started generating power on July 21, 2011.

The People’s Republic of China has also initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt thermal breeder reactor technology (Liquid fluoride thorium reactor). It was formally announced at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual conference in January 2011. Its ultimate target is to investigate and develop a thorium based molten salt nuclear system in about 20 years.

Kirk Sorensen, former NASA scientist and Chief Nuclear Technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering, has been a long time promoter of thorium fuel cycle and particularly liquid fluoride thorium reactors. In 2011, Sorensen founded Flibe Energy, a company aimed to develop 20-50 MW LFTR reactor designs to power military bases.

South Korea is developing a design for a standardized modular FBR for export, to complement the standardized PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) and CANDU designs they have already developed and built, but has not yet committed to building a prototype.

The BN-600 (Beloyarsk NNP in the town of Zarechny, Sverdlovsk Oblast) is still operational. A second reactor (BN-800) is scheduled to be constructed before 2015.

On 16 February 2006 the U.S., France and Japan signed an "arrangement" to research and develop sodium-cooled fast reactors in support of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

In September 2010, French government allocated 651.6 millions euros to the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique to finalize the design of "Astrid" (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration), a 600 MW reactor design of the 4th generation to be operational in 2020.

In October 2010, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy signed a memorandum of understanding with the operators of the Department of Energy's Savannah River site, which should allow the construction of a demonstration plant based on the company's S-PRISM fast breeder reactor prior to the design receiving full NRC licensing approval. In October 2011, The Independent reported that the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and senior advisers within the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) had asked for technical and financial details of the PRISM, partly as a means of reducing the country's plutonium stockpile.

The traveling wave reactor proposed in a patent by Intellectual Ventures is a fast breeder reactor designed to not need fuel reprocessing during the decades-long lifetime of the reactor, leaving the spent fuel in place. Over the years, a wave of fission starting at one end of the fuel cylinder would drive a wave of breeding ahead of it.