Letter: Fast flux heartbreak

There is nothing more degrading and disappointing to the people who spent their professional lives working on the FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) project at Hanford, than to read what you published in a recent paper (US restarts nuclear testing facility in Idaho, Nov. 16).

The ignorance and susceptibility of the general public, Department of Engery, politicians and even company managements, to words and events that had nothing to do with a sodium-cooled fast reactor, led to its demise (in 1992).

So today I read the article about a new facility “five times more powerful than commercial nuclear plants.”

There’s nothing you can do for fission reactors that hasn’t already been done.

The secondary headlines are mind boggling — fuels that are “less likely to lead to a reactore core meltdown.”

So our people in D.C. lost to Idaho, as usual, about 25 years ago, and we live on with what could have been.

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 9:32 AM with the headline "Letter: Fast flux heartbreak."