Publication Laka-library:
Wind Power Versus Plutonium: An Examination of Wind Energy Potential and a Comparision of Offshore Wind Energy to Plutonium Use in Japan
| Author | IEER |
| Date | 1999 |
| Classification | 4.21.0.00/11 (JAPAN - GENERAL) |
| Front | 
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From the publication:
Foreword This report is part of IEER's global outreach program on reducing nuclear dangers, and on achieving complete and enduring nuclear disarmament. The energy choices we make will likely shape the environment of the Earth for generations to come. They will also profoundly affect the prospects of reducing proliferation risks, and of achieving stable and enduring nuclear disarmament. No energy-related question is more pressing and more important for non-proliferation and disarmament purposes than the future of plutonium use in the commercial economy. For over half a century, the nuclear establishment has promised the world energy from plutonium. It was to be plentiful in supply, lasting into the indefinite future and, in the 1950s, even "too cheap to meter." After tens of billions of dollars in research and development expenditures and little to show for it, programs for the use of plutonium must be viewed as failures. Plutonium is now widely recognized as an uneconomic fuel. It is not even competitive with uranium and is unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. However, its proponents point out, as they have done from the start of the nuclear power era, that once-through uranium fueled reactors use a very small portion of the uranium resource base because they rely mainly on uranium-235, which is only 0.7 percent of natural uranium. The most abundant isotope, uranium-238, which is almost 99.3 percent of natural uranium is almost completely wasted (though a small portion is converted to plutonium and fissioned in the course of reactor operation). Since economically extractable uranium resources are unlikely to be a fuel source for the millennia to come, the advocates of plutonium point out that the conversion ofuranium-238 to fissile plutonium fuel in breeder reactors is necessary for a long-term nuclear future. (1) (1) The argument for the conversion of non-fissile thorium-232 into fissile uranium-233 is about the same as that for converting uranium-238 into plutonium, with the difference that the practical utilization of thorium- 232 has faced even greater obstacles than plutonium.
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