Sentences with phrase «into reactor fuel»

Not exact matches

Under an agreement with Russia, the United States was to convert 34 metric tons of plutonium into fuel for civilian reactors that generate electricity.

TEPCO modeling and analyses suggest that most, if not all, of the fuel in the Unit 1 reactor melted, burned through the reactor pressure vessel, dropped to the bottom of the containment vessel, and perhaps ate into the concrete base.

Fuel units must be stored initially in pools at reactor sites for about five years, until the decay heat drops enough to permit movement into dry cask containers.

This is the case because even when fission is stopped by driving neutron - absorbing control rods into a reactor core, radioactivity still warms the fuel rods.

In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods — namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long - lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium.

This nuclear fuel cycle would combine two innovations: pyrometallurgical processing (a high - temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel) and advanced fast - neutron reactors capable of burning that 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.

Next they scrape the accumulated materials off the electrode, melt them down, cast them into an ingot and pass the ingot to a refabrication line for conversion into fast - reactor fuel.

Nuclear Electric expects to finish loading uranium dioxide fuel into Britain's first commercial pressurised - water reactor this week.

Two snakelike robots crawled through a pipe leading into the 48 - meter - tall primary containment vessel in the Unit 1 reactor to ascertain the state of melted fuel masses.

Water is being deliberately circulated through each reactor every day to cool the fuel within — but the plant lies on a slope, and water from precipitation keeps flowing into the buildings as well.

That is also enough to meet almost half the fuel needs of the 104 U.S. reactors, once various plants located throughout the country shape this uranium into half - inch -(1.27 - centimeter --RRB- diameter black pellets and then form them into rods by coating the pellets with zirconium cladding.

That hydrogen buildup was the result of hot steam coming into contact with overheated nuclear fuel rods covered by a cladding of zirconium alloy, or «zircaloy» — the material used as fuel - rod cladding in all water - cooled nuclear reactors, which constitute more than 90 percent of the world's power reactors.

For the first time in decades a new uranium rod fabrication plant is operating in New Mexico and it may soon be joined by as many as three others in the U.S.. That's because 2013 will see the expiration of an agreement with Russia that allows the U.S. to blend down the highly enriched uranium from decommissioned Russian nuclear warheads into the lower level enriched fuel used in U.S. nuclear reactors — a program known as «Megatons to Megawatts» that currently provides as much as 50 percent of U.S. nuclear fuel.

Two other companies, Energy Matter Conversion Corp. (EMC2) and Tri Alpha Energy, are developing reactors that use proton - boron fuel, which requires even higher temperatures than deuterium does but allows almost direct conversion of fusion into electricity, without boiling water to drive a generator.

If unchecked, a meltdown can send superheated fuel through the steel and concrete that surrounds it, damaging or destroying the reactor and releasing extreme levels of radiation into the environment.

One of their most significant contributions was the design of a concrete shield to prevent molten fuel seeping from the reactor and through the ground into the water table.

The government has already spent about $ 4 billion on the project, Scott noted, which is supposed to help convert 34 metric tons of weapons - grade plutonium from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere into fuel pellets for commercial reactors.

«We're going to take plutonium oxide that's a powder, turn it into fuel form, put it in the reactor, make it more radioactive, and then put that into the ground,» Loewen admits, which would also render it unfit for nuclear weapons.

Hydrogen can also be split from water in high - temperature nuclear reactors or generated from fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas, with the resulting carbon dioxide captured and sequestered rather than released into the atmosphere.

The gate allowed water from the reactor well to leak into the spent fuel pool, partially refilling it.

The most logical solution, experts say, would be to send the 9700 kilograms of LEU to Russia for conversion into fuel rods for Iran's Russian - built Bushehr nuclear reactor, in operation since 2011.

«If I was going to try to get rid of 100 tons of plutonium, I'd burn it in a light - water reactor,» Cochran says, by making it into the mixed oxide fuels.

To implement the PMDA, the United States has been building a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility to convert the plutonium into nuclear reactor fuel.

In these countries, used fuel is recycled to recover uranium and plutonium (produced during irradiation in reactors) and reprocess it into new fuel.

Since he still doesn't know what fuel would make it run, it's still not very interesting, other than the fact that he's put a lot of evident work into figuring out some of the basic properties of the reactor despite not having any clue how its core would actually work.

The product cylinders are then loaded into sturdy protective containers for shipment to a nuclear fuel fabricator where the enriched uranium is converted into fuel assemblies for nuclear power reactors.

The plant will also host the Encapsulation Repository Facility where spent reactor fuel will be placed in iron and copper lined canisters that weigh 27 metric tonnes and will be embedded 500 meters into granite bedrock.

Under a landmark agreement between the United States and Russia, 500 metric tons of former Soviet nuclear weapons material was converted into fuel for America's civilian power reactors.

Through a multi-step process in Russia, the bomb - grade uranium material was converted into a different chemical form and then diluted into low enriched uranium suitable for use in fabricating commercial nuclear power reactor fuel.

PRISM puts the used fuel from the core into the upper portion of the reactor vessel.

Fast reactors on a closed fuel cycle use nearly all the actinides fed into them, while low energy reactors use only around one percent of the fuel.

Szilard had many ideas about the reactor design, and it was at this time that he actually thought up a name to the «nuclear breeder reactor,» which is supposed to make more fuel than it consumes by bombarding uranium - 238, which does not fission, turning it into plutonium - 239, which does fission.

«What it does is it takes different sorts of fuel materials such as plutonium or used nuclear fuel, it casts that into a metallic fuel, it puts it in a reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant — and if you have liquid sodium as a coolant then the energies of the neutrons are higher so you can use a different fuel source.

The removed «spent» fuel then is placed into deep pools of water at the reactor site, where it continues to generate heat and radiation (Figure 1).

This was the fuel waiting to be placed into the reactor core upon its restart.

I was trying to estimate the mining footprints of solar and nuclear, and came up with some very tentative rough estimates that ore input for solar energy might have an energy density (per unit mass) ~ 5 to 80 times coal, while nuclear (convential US fuel cycle) may be ~ 20 times coal — on the solar side, this doesn't include some balance of system components, and on the nuclear side, it only includes the U, but on the solar side, the actual energy density could get much higher with recycling of the same material into multiple successive generations of solar energy devices, and on the nuclear side, breeder reactors.

Since a reactor full fuel load is around 11 tons of 2 % U235 and 98 % U238, and one load lasts about 10 years, and what one coal fired power plant puts into the air and cinders fully fuels a nuclear power plant.

Energy Probe has also been successful in stopping the export of Canada's Candu nuclear reactors, most of which have been sought by states with nuclear weapons aspirations — the Candu design lends itself to surreptitious diversion of spent fuel suitable for reprocessing into weapons grade material.

Pebble bed reactors have a high enough temperature that they can combine water and CO2 into liquid fuels in the future.

Most pressurized water reactors (PWR, the type I worked on in the U.S. Navy) use water around the fuel rods to both and transfer heat away fro the fuel to do work and reflect neutrons back into the fuel rods.

Researchers at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, have concentrated 3,000 «suns» of solar thermal energy into a solar reactor at 1,500 °C for thermochemical splitting of H2O and CO2 into hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas), the precursor to kerosene and other liquid fuels.

I don't think it will take much to convince me, and the general public to move away from fossil fuels and into alternatives like Molten Salt reactors and other alternative energy.

Have you looked into what is involved in extracting material that is suitable for weapons from light water reactor used fuels?

A team from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, University of Massachusetts - Amherst and Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology of South Korea has demonstrated the feasibility of using proton - exchange - membrane (PEM) reactors electrocatalytically to reduce biomass - derived oxygenates into renewable fuels and chemicals.

France and Japan, on the other hand, routinely extract and reprocess plutonium for reuse as reactor fuel, but the dual - use potential of this process has led Holdren and his coauthors to recommend a «once - through fuel cycle» in which the spent fuel is not reprocessed, but instead goes directly into a storage repository.

After several decades of laboratory testing, these type of fuels are set to be loaded into a U.S. civilian nuclear reactor in 2018, but there is no reason they could not be loaded into civilian reactors this fall — something that would require a modest investment by DOE of well - under $ 500 million.

• The restructuring of the former Areva into Framatome and Orano is complete, with the world's largest nuclear plant operator EDF taking ownership of Framatome, which focuses on reactors, fuel fabrication and services.

While the basic technology is Canadian, R&D at Qinshan in China since 2008 has turned a simple concept into technology which can now be utilised, so that the used fuel from four conventional reactors can fully supply one AFCR unit (as well as providing recycled plutonium for MOX).

In its current state, he estimates that an individual would need to shovel the equivalent of a man's weight of sugar into a 250 - gallon fuel tank so that the E. coli - reactor could produce enough hydrogen to power the average home for an entire day.