On top of all this, the new government announced ambitious plans on May 25th to build 40 new fast-breeder nuclear-power stations in Russia over the next 30 years.

ECONOMIST: Russia

In the 1970s and 1980s the federal government poured billions of dollars into the Synthetic Fuels Corporation to develop liquid and gas fuel from coal, and into the fast-breeder nuclear reactor.

ECONOMIST: How the government can help things along

And the fast-breeder type of nuclear reactor in which plutonium was used as fuel is no longer economic.

ECONOMIST: The nuclear industry

With plutonium no longer needed for use in the world's abandoned fast breeder reactor programmes and nuclear powers getting rid of their atomic weapons, large stockpiles of the highly toxic plutonium metal are starting to build up.

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The panelists expect new nuclear plants to take the form of small modular reactors and, eventually, fast breeder reactors.

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The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said there was a "clear and compelling" case to deal with the breeder material at Sellafield.

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What they failed to appreciate, and what the company failed to tell them, was that a fast-breeder uses fuel that has a 19% concentration of the fissile isotope of uranium, 235U. Ordinary nuclear reactors use fuel containing around 3% of the fissile isotope.

ECONOMIST: All over in a flash