Sentences with phrase «monju fast reactor»

In its efforts to develop safer, cheaper, and more efficient nuclear reactors, the Idaho National Laboratory has researched half a dozen next - generation reactor designs; these two (the sodium - cooled fast reactor and the very - high - temperature reactor) are the most promising.

To compensate for this difficulty, INL researchers are developing computer simulations that model the way liquid sodium acts inside a fast reactor.

Their efforts focus on two new designs: the very - high - temperature reactor (VHTR) and the sodium - cooled fast reactor (SFR).

«Yeah, there's less concrete and, yeah, there's less steel in the reactor vessel,» says nuclear engineer Eric Loewen, chief consulting engineer at GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, which is proposing a modular fast reactor to help the U.K. with its plutonium problem.

If we were to begin today, the first of the fast reactors might come online in about 15 years.

Water can not be employed in a fast reactor to carry the heat from the core — it would slow the fast neutrons.

The annual waste output from a fast reactor with the same electrical capacity, in contrast, is a little more than a single ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics.

In the 1980s this research was directed toward a fast reactor (dubbed the advanced liquidmetal reactor, or ALMR), with metallic fuel cooled by a liquid metal, that was to be integrated with a high - temperature pyrometallurgical processing unit for recycling and replenishing the fuel.

Coupling Reactor Types If advanced fast reactors come into use, they will at first burn spent thermal - reactor fuel that has been recycled using pyroprocessing.

The resource gains would be modest, whereas the long - term waste problem would remain, and the entire effort would delay for only a short time the need for efficient fast reactors.

One sodium fire began in 1995 at the Monju fast reactor in Japan.

As today's thermal reactors reach the end of their lifetimes, they could be replaced by fast reactors.

We understand that their first fast reactors will use oxide or carbide fuel rather than metal — a less than optimum path, chosen presumably because the PUREX reprocessing technology is mature, whereas pyroprocessing has not yet been commercially demonstrated.

Both India and China have recently announced that they plan to extend their energy resources by deploying fast reactors.

Fast reactors can thus minimize the risk that spent fuel from energy production would be used for weapons production, while providing a unique ability to squeeze the maximum energy out of nuclear fuel.

Fast reactors can extract more energy from nuclear fuel than thermal reactors do because their rapidly moving (higherenergy) neutrons cause atomic fi ssions more effi ciently than the slow thermal neutrons do.

But a spokesman for Dounreay, Ian Shepherd, stresses that comprehensive monitoring of the site started last autumn as part of a multimillion pound programme to decommission two fast reactors and their associated plants.

«We're not building a fast reactor just to build it,» Reynolds said.

«I believe there is a desire there [in China] to use fast reactor technology to extend their energy base and enhance their energy security position.

The Tennessee Valley Authority hopes to catalyze development of such reactors by installing one at its Clinch River site in Tennessee, former home of the U.S.'s failed attempt to build its own commercial fast reactor.

But experimental fast reactors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France have all been shut down because of high costs and concerns over handling plutonium.

He said that the government had reviewed its position and concluded that the funding of research and development on the fast reactor at Dounreay was not a priority beyond March 1993, as there was agreement that commercial deployment of the fast reactor would not be justified until well into the next century.

Fast reactors still have fans.

JAEA engineers are also designing a next - generation fast reactor, but there has been no decision on actually building it.

Thierry Dujardin, an official with the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, told Science for a 27 February 2009 article that fast reactors could help reduce nuclear waste and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The dream turned nasty because technologically the fast reactor was too demanding.

It was the right one, even though it will be painful for the dedicated but dwindling bank of enthusiasts who support the fast reactor.

The real message, though, must be for those in the nuclear industry who still believe that it makes sense to press ahead with a European demonstration fast reactor.

Fast reactors with an elegant ability to «breed» more fissile materials than they consumed in fuel, seemed destined to play a major part in helping the world to solve its energy needs.

Rather than the pellets of uranium oxide used in other fast reactors and conventional reactors as fuel, GE would fabricate metal alloy fuels, with the plutonium or uranium mixed with zirconium metal.

The U.K. is considering a plan to build two of General Electric's PRISM fast reactors, the latest in a series of fast - reactor designs that for several decades have attempted with mixed success to handle plutonium and other radioactive waste from nuclear power.

«The possibility of cooperative work with Japan in the area of fast reactors is something that is attractive to us precisely because they have Monju,» Daniel Poneman, the U.S. deputy secretary of energy, said at a press conference today.

Poneman said Monju came up in the discussions because of the possibility of using fast reactors to burn plutonium and the long - lived isotopes of elements such as neptunium and americium that account for much of the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste.

Nuclear power experts from Japan and the United States met in Tokyo today, and one surprising topic of conversation was the host country's Monju experimental fast reactor.

The idea remains that fast reactors, which get their name because the neutrons that initiate fission in the reactor are zipping about faster than those in a conventional reactor, could offer a speedy solution to cleaning some nasty nuclear waste, which fissions better with fast neutrons, while also providing electricity as a by - product.

As a result of numerous fires from leaking systems, operating sodium - cooled fast reactors to date have been shut down more than they have run.

Plus, the U.K. has a poor record in the past with its own experimental fast reactor designs — the Dounreay Fast Reactor and the Prototype Fast Reactor — including multiple sodium leaks.

Such fast reactors are more expensive than even traditional reactors, such as Westinghouse's new AP - 1000 under construction in China and the U.S., which are estimated to cost roughly $ 7 billion apiece.

One attractive feature of fast reactors is that they can produce more fuel than they consume, avoiding the issue of the limited supplies of the uranium used in conventional nuclear reactors.

«At one time or another, [fast reactors] were a priority program in the U.S., Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Russia,» notes physicist Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Even with a fleet of such fast reactors, nations would nonetheless require an ultimate home for radioactive waste, one reason that a 2010 M.I.T. report on spent nuclear fuel dismissed such fast reactors.

The better half of table salt, this element cools a fast reactor nicely and also ensures there is no perpetual chain reaction.

Novel design The trouble with fast reactors has largely been related to what's used to cool them — liquid sodium in the case of GE's PRISM and many others.

The European fast reactor programme — led by Britain, France and Germany — had hoped to carry out important research at the fast reactor research centre at Dounreay in Scotland, which is operated by AEA Technology.

The research would culminate in the commissioning of the first European fast reactor (EFR) early next century.

Colin Gregory, director of the fast reactor research programme at Dounreay, says that the EFR will inevitably take longer to construct and cost more without more time for research at Dounreay.

The assemblies were built for Germany's SNR 300 fast reactor at Kalkar, which was built but never licensed to operate.

Britain's fast reactor programme has been running for nearly 40 years at a total cost of over # 4 billion.

The world's first commercial - size fast reactor, the BN - 600 near Ekaterinburg in the central Urals, began operating in 1980 on a fuel of enriched uranium.

An unlikely alliance between Japan and Russia is emerging as the last refuge of the fast reactor now that Western Europe and the US have effectively abandoned the technology.