Fast Breeder Reactor Economics

The long-term incentive for the development of breeders is well known: better use of natural uranium in order to extend the potential of nuclear energy by a factor of 50 with given uranium resources, and in fact by a much larger factor, since also uranium resources from low-grade ores can be used economically in breeder reactors. Nuclear energy without breeders represents a relatively modest contribution to the world’s total energy supply; with breeders, it allows thousands of years of high energy consumption.