Originally published January 6 2006
Energy consultant believes Illinois should consider updating its nuclear power structure with Integral Fast Reactors
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to Chicago Sun-Times writer and energy consultant Tom Randall, the answer for Illinois's aging power infrastructure is the construction of Integral Fast Reactors (IFR), which are new-generation nuclear plants that run on nuclear waste fuel, of which Illinois has a large supply.
The Chicago area economy runs on an aging nuclear-power infrastructure that must be updated if it is to provide economic growth and jobs.
Illinois produces more electricity with nuclear energy than any other state, just over 50 percent of its needs.
In the 1970s and '80s, 14 nuclear plants were built, eight of them primarily to service Chicago and northern Illinois.
Replacing aging nuclear facilities with gas-fired plants is an unsatisfactory option considering that high demand and limited supply of natural gas are already pushing the price of natural gas through the roof.
They inherited an aging power infrastructure that was born out of a morass of environmental and regulatory rules that make building any kind of electricity-generation plant nearly impossible.
It involves that so-called "waste" or spent nuclear fuel, and a new generation of nuclear plants known as Integral Fast Reactors (IFR).
Using existing technology, reactors can extract less than 1 percent of the energy from nuclear fuel.
But the new IFRs can extract 99 percent of the energy from that same fuel by integrating a new fuel recycling process with "fast" reactors that are capable of using it.
This relatively straightforward process is described in detail by physicists William Hannum, Gerald Marsh and George Stanford in the December issue of Scientific American.
Therefore, simply building IFRs next to existing nuclear plants in Illinois would enable us to use waste fuel over and over again, providing virtually limitless electricity for Chicago and northern Illinois.
A simple executive order to lift the ban on the specific type of recycling used by the IFRs, pyroprocessing, would take care of the first hurdle.
While that work is in progress, Congress and the administration must tackle the much higher hurdle of streamlining the arduous and uncertain permitting process at the federal level.
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