China's New Breeder Reactors May Produce More Than Just Watts

upstart writes:

China's New Breeder Reactors May Produce More Than Just Watts:

Jutting out from the coast of China's Fujian province, Changbiao Island may seem small and unremarkable. It is anything but. This is where the China National Nuclear Corp. is building two fast-neutron nuclear breeder reactors, the first of which is slated to connect to the grid in 2023, the second in 2026. So China could start producing weapons-grade plutonium there very soon.

They are called breeder reactors because they produce more nuclear fuel than they consume. According to Chinese authorities, the ones on Changbiao are civilian power reactors, designed to generate 600 megawatts of electricity each, which amounts to a little more than 1 percent of the total capacity of China's nuclear power sector. But each reactor could also yield up to 200 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year, enough for about 50 nuclear warheads-which is making nuclear-arms-control experts in Western countries nervous.

"China is in the middle of a big buildup of its nuclear-weapon arsenal," says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and nuclear-policy expert at Princeton University. "My belief is that one of the purposes of these reactors is to produce weapons-grade plutonium for that buildup."

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