LONG-TIME DEVELOPMENT LINES

The current state of nuclear power engineering is described. It is shown that this industry is still at the initial stage in general industrial use in spite of experimental evidence accumulated for more than half a century, it has not even attab~ed the stage of establishment, which would enable one to utilize all the power facilities concealed bz it. The long-term future of nuclear power involves a closed fuel cycle including the recycling of fi~el from extended breeding of fissile materials, which supports the safe treatment of radioactive wastes. Nuclear power has no alternatives over millennia, and any groups opposed to its extension cmd companies within the country that strive to delay its development by not providing facilities for the latter in essence have started on a road involving marked di~iculty for our civilization. A structure has developed in certain countries in nuclear power as part of the energy industry that in essence represents the initial stage in the possible development of this industry. Nuclear power at present uses an open fuel cycle, which is due to the predominant use of plants containing thermal reactors, most of which are light-water ones, and which consume mainly uranium fuel, which is combined with long-time storage of spent rods. Thermal-reactor spent-fuel reprocessing is used to extract plutonium accumulated in reactor conversion (France, Britain, and Belgium) and return it to the cycle, together with the return of unburned uranium (Russia). However, this apparent closure of the cycle (not complete closure) is a half-measure, which does not allow one to utilize all the vast advantages in nuclear power. The mass content of the fissile 235U in natural uranium is only 0.72%. Further, the main natural uranium isotope 238U is converted by the neutron spectrum in a thermal reactor to plutonium with a breeding coefficient of only 0.5. This means that one cannot burn more than 1-2% of all the mined natural uranium in current light-water thermal power reactors. Discovered commercial reserves of uranium ores are not very abundant (about 5 million tons), so nuclear power based on thermal reactors is not sustainable, since it can be supplied with fuel at best for a century or a century and a half, while reprocessing to render the radioactive wastes safe and store them is ultimately uneconomic, and it is impermissible to store spent fuel that has not been reprocessed and contains long-lived radionuclides in subsurface stores on the basis of ecological arguments. On the other hand, researches on nuclear power that have been carried out during the 50-year development period