Sentences with phrase «conventional reactors»

Some could be reused in conventional reactors, but most is surplus to requirements.

Another potential benefit is that because the reactor uses its thorium fuel more efficiently, it could reduce radioactive waste by a factor of around 100 compared with conventional reactors, says Per Peterson, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

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.

And, thanks to a more than 800 - degree Celsius boiling point, it can operate at low pressures, unlike conventional reactors.

Breakthrough explains that the reactors are inherently safer and operate more efficiently than the fleet of inferior conventional reactors that occupy the world's nuclear power landscape today.

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.

An SMR can power around 7,000 homes while a conventional reactor can power over one million.

The strategies investigated include an evolutionary transmutation strategy in which the ADS provides additional flexibility by enabling plutonium utilisation in conventional reactors and confining the minor actinides to a small part of the fuel cycle, and two innovative transuranics (TRU) burning strategies, with an FR or an ADS, in which plutonium and minor actinides are managed together to minimise the proliferation risk.

Liquid thorium reactors - also known as thorium molten salt reactors - operate at much higher temperatures than conventional reactors.

In the Flibe design, thorium reaction temperatures rise to about 750 degrees Celsius to drive gas turbines, compared to conventional reactors, which tend to reach less than half that temperature and drive less efficient steam turbines, he said.

But it will take nothing less than for the industry to shift from its conventional reactor designs and from the uranium 235 fuel process on which it began to settle in the 1960s, according to Sorensen.

Proponents of MSRs say they are meltdown - proof, and that they are safer and more cost effective than the conventional reactors that the nuclear industry has built for some 50 years.

The promise of EM2 is to deliver low cost power for centuries to come from spent nuclear fuel currently stockpiled — burning almost one hundred times more of the energy content of nuclear fuel than conventional reactors.

They use uranium more efficiently than conventional reactors, making sea water uranium affordable and unlimited for at least a few hundred years.