For those of you who are not familiar with breeder reactors, here's a short exploration of the topic.

As a nuclear reactor operates, some of the unconsumed uranium in the fuel elements absorbs stray neutrons and is transformed into plutonium. But plutonium is fissionable, and can be used as a fuel. We've known how to do this for over a half-century, and have built several proof-of-concept plants, but they are expensive to build and operate and extracting the plutonium from the spent fission plant fuel elements is dangerous and expensive. But we needed to do that anyway. Just storing them indefinitely is going to bite us in the ass some day.

It was also decided that flooding the world with cheap plutonium would lead to nuclear weapons proliferation. Maybe so. Banning a plutonium economy is the one thing Jimmy Carter did I really disagree with, he was a nuclear engineer, he should have known better. An active breeder program would have provided all the energy we need for the foreseeable future. But the program should have been up and running in the 1960s, according to the documents I read. It was never started because of the enormous up-front investment required, and the reluctance of the power industry to pay their fair share. Its too late to start now. That old Law of Supply and Demand again. No one thinks in the long term. Anyway, that ship has sailed. The development of the breeders was to be done during the lifetime of the first generation of nuclear reactors, and as they were decommissioned the next generation of nukes would be designed for plutonium fuel.

The fact that plutonium is a fuel that can be extracted from nuclear waste is not a violation of my "You can't get something for nothing" rule. That energy was put into those uranium atoms in some distant supernova explosion long before the sun was born, and when uranium absorbs an extra neutron and becomes plutonium, it simply transforms that nucleus into an atom we can fission.

We've known all this for over a half century. I read it in some of the surviving documents of the Atoms for Peace program. We just pissed it all away.