Meet the Man Who Could End Global Warming. Meet the Technology that can do it!

"....The man who is going to save the world is an ordinary-looking man. He's average in height, with an average face. He has blue eyes and sandy hair. He wears eyeglasses. He's forty-eight years old....a classic all-American Homo suburbanus, but in fact he is a former officer of the United States Navy with a Ph.D. in a fiendishly complicated type of engineering. 

He is low-key and unassuming, with a quiet midwestern sense of humor....The man who is going to save the world is also a damn good father, a tendency that is at the heart of this world-saving business...."

Read more: Nuclear Waste Disposal - Eric Loewen's Disposal of Nuclear Waste - Esquire 

Eric Loewen: Best and Brightest 2009 Honoree on Nuclear Waste.

The next thing you should know is that Loewen's miracle technology is not some airy concept. It cost billions of dollars to develop. Some of the biggest companies in America spent ten years refining it under the close supervision of the U. S. government — before the program was shuttered and abandoned in a hasty political decision that makes Who Killed the Electric Car? look like a promotional film for General Motors.

"...."So what is nuclear waste? It's still uranium! Right? It's 95 percent uranium. It's still usable. But we've got these evil things called transuranics, which is 1 percent of the total and 99 percent of the headache..."

"...."...And that is my fuel. The problem becomes the solution."...."

"....Transuranics are highly radioactive elements like plutonium, typically regarded not as sources of energy but for their capacity to vaporize cities.

"But if I build a different kind of reactor that uses liquid sodium instead of water to slow things down, I can have a higher neutron speed and that stuff becomes a fuel. You just mix it in the crucible, put in the transuranics, put in some uranium, put in some zirconium, and you cast it into thin rods. That technology's been developed, it's easy to do, and you do it in a room about this size [a conference room]...."

...."So [GE] sat down and said, You know what, we're pretty good at making washing machines and jet engines in a factory and replicating them. Why don't we make a sodium-cooled reactor that's factory-built, modular, with passive safety and replicate that, instead of trying to scale up?"

Passive safety meant that it would shut itself off automatically instead of melting down. 

Replicability meant the reactor vessel couldn't be more than twenty feet in diameter, because that's the biggest you can ship down a rail line. So they would gang reactor modules together to power a single turbine. They named it the Power Reactor, Innovative Small Module, or PRISM.....

....much of the environmental movement continues to hate nuclear power as an article of faith, and armchair scientists point to the difficulties of the fast nuclear plants in Russia and Japan, and the infinite armies of inertia simply avert their eyes....

The point is, PRISM isn't half as complicated.... "That's how I answer the naysayers who say we can't build this till 2040," he says...."

GE Hitachi Website - The information is Short and Sweet

http://www.ge-energy.com/products_and_services/products/nuclear_energy/prism_sodium_cooled_reactor.jsp

" .... the forces of nature shut the reactor down .... "

Dick Lindsey: " .... being associated with some of the .... early pioneers in the nuclear business .... the attitude the designers brought with them, it was a can-do attitude and it stayed that way for all the years I worked here ...."

Dr Sackett: ".... the significance of EBR-II to the nuclear science community, was proof that reactors were safe .... that worst accident is complete loss of power to everything .... and failure of all the safety systems .... we did that at EBR-II and the reactor protected itself. It shut itself down safely .... "

Darrell Pfannenstiel: " .... we got to watch the forces of nature shut the reactor down .... we'd found a reactor that could protect itself .... "

Dr Sackett: " .... the day of the final test was one of the most exciting days of my time. To see all these colleagues, respected scientists from around the world, come and watch this event in a live reactor .... "

Darrell Pfannesteil: " .... if I [n]ever see another Pressurised Water Reactor again, it would not bother me. This is the technology to go with .... "

Dr Sackett: " .... there was a vision about EBR-II that had to do with secure energy, safe energy, clean energy .... some of the things that drove the vision of the people who started this, [it] is really compelling .... "

Dr Sackett: " .... The Integral Fast Reactor was the combination and integration of all the things we had learned from the EBR-II and the fuel cycle facility experience. It integrated all of the best of the technology that we had developed and discovered, not only here but worldwide .... "

Dick Lindsey: " .... this facility is one that virtually gives the Earth and its inhabitants an unlimited power supply .... "

Dr Sackett, talking about 4 distinct periods of testing in EBR-II's history. Period 1:
Dr Sackett: " .... One was its initial operation as a complete power plant, producing electricity, recycling fuel .... "

Period 4 included burning up transuranic elements in recycled fuel rods:
Dick Lindsey: " .... because we were burning the transuranics, .... that then would make our waste repository change[s] from a mega-thousand year problem to a thousand year, maybe at the most, and we have buildings older than that .... "

Dr Sackett: " .... used in a system like this, we already have enough uranium mined and set aside to supply the energy needs of the United States for several centuries .... "

Dr Sackett: " .... the debate in the senate initially started out as a debate over budgets and the Japanese stepped up and said 'We're willing to add another $60 million to the budgets at EBR-II. So they took away the budget argument. And then it became an argument about the political nature. If the United States terminates its work in nuclear power, the rest of the world might follow .... "

Dr Sackett: " .... when I had to go to the operating crews and tell themthat we had the order to shut EBR-II down, the reaction was not 'What is going to happen to me?' the reaction of all of the crews was 'Doesn't the Country realise what they're losing here?' .... "

Dr Sackett in tears - the integrity of this man is beyond reproach and his despair at the waste of this opportunity for the USA and the planet is visceral.

Dr Sackett: " .... I remember directing shutdown and the SCRAM and then just silence .... "

The most plausible conspiracy theory suggests it was Bill Clinton's payback to the environmentalist movement for its support.

Thanks again anti-nukes everywhere. It's only been the best part of a 20 year delay, but breeder reactors will prevail and there's still a chance that your children and grandchildren will not hate you quite so much.

Doesn't the Country realise what they're losing her?

Do yourself a favour and try to think if you can make a contribution to supporting a breeder reactor programme:  Making a Contribution: The Story of EBR-II