Sentences with phrase «natural uranium»
"Natural uranium" refers to uranium that is found in nature without any additional processing or enrichment. It is the uranium as it exists in its raw state. Full definition
The colorless, odorless, radioactive gas, which forms as a by - product of natural uranium decay in rocks, builds up in homes, causing lung cancer.
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To produce this fuel, companies enrich the concentration of U235 in natural uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to the appropriate level and sell the fuel to utility customers.
Reactors not using natural uranium fuel require uranium enrichment,...
In 1942, Bill wrote to Willard Libby, whose team was trying to enrich natural uranium in the U-235 isotope to create material for an atomic bomb.
Nearly 2 million people throughout the Great Plains and California above aquifer sites contaminated with natural uranium that is mobilized by human - contributed nitrate, according to a study from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.
Natural uranium contains about 0.7 % U235.
«Two major US aquifers contaminated by natural uranium: Naturally occurring uranium is being mobilized by farm - related pollution.»
However, when asked to comment, one CEO said Canada is in a strong position because Candu reactors use heavy water instead of boiled or pressurized water, which allows the reactor to run on natural uranium instead of enriched uranium fuel.
Many aspects of the radioactive material problems at Baley have yet to be clarified, as the local thorium mines and other geologic sources of radiation may be producing a different mix of radiation sources than those produced by normal natural uranium decay.
The article, published recently in Open Chemistry may lead to the development of a process to remove uranium from wastewater at the front - end of the nuclear fuel cycle, or even extracting natural uranium from sea water.
«We're running at five million SWU,» Derryberry says, enough to turn more than 18 million pounds (8.2 million kilograms) of natural uranium into more than 1.8 million pounds (816,465 kilograms) of uranium enriched to contain 4.5 percent U235.
The TWR is a liquid sodium - cooled fast reactor that uses depleted or natural uranium as fuel.
The widespread use and knowledge of uranium centrifuges makes natural uranium the preferred source of nuclear weapons material anyway.
Uranium makes up the bulk of the spent nuclear fuel (around 94 percent); this is unfissioned uranium that has lost most of its uranium 235 and resembles natural uranium (which is just 0.71 percent fissile uranium 235).
By way of comparison, natural uranium ore measured 1.57 μGy / hr.
Other studies offer different estimates of the amount of energy it will take to make the uranium fuel and, as the WNA notes, one metric ton of natural uranium yields nearly 20,000 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of coal — the cheapest form of electric generation at present.
The same company responsible for enriching natural uranium at Paducah also dilutes the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, (90 percent U235) contained in more than 14,000 Russian nuclear warheads.
The concentration of this isotope must therefore be boosted in natural uranium before it can function as nuclear power plant fuel.
Natural uranium consists of two long - lived isotopes uranium - 238 and the lighter uranium - 235.
Earlier this month, the Nuclear Control Institute, a nongovernment organisation in the US, concluded in a report that Japan could save $ 32.6 billion «by developing a 50 - year, low - enriched or natural uranium reserve in place of its commercial plutonium programme».
With the help of the moderators and the control rods natural Uranium - 235 can be used for industrial purposes.
Enrichment is a critical step in transforming natural uranium into nuclear fuel to produce electricity.
In fact, just in the depleted uranium (DU) waste alone (the stuff left over after natural uranium has been enriched), we have more than 10 times the extractable energy than we have from coal in the ground!
Iran would have two basic options for achieving that reduction: exporting the excess LEU or blending it with depleted uranium, which, compared with natural uranium, has less of the fissile isotope uranium - 235.
Iran has said it will downsize the calandria — the vessel in which a core resides — making it harder to later reconfigure the reactor to switch back to natural uranium fuel and produce more plutonium.
In the U.S., there is currently only one plant capable of so enriching natural uranium — the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, built in 1952.
Uranium enrichment is sold as separative work units (SWU), which represent the level of effort required to increase the concentration of U235 in natural uranium.
Measurements of natural uranium and its decay products in mastodon bone fragments enabled scientists to estimate their age.
«It became clear to Fermi almost immediately that in order to do this with natural uranium you had to slow down the neutrons,» Bethe said.
Therefore, the excess 235U produced by the decay of 247Cm can not be seen in minerals or inclusions that contain large or even average amounts of natural uranium.
For every 1,000 atoms of natural uranium, only seven can easily split under neutron bombardment: They are the fissile isotope U235.
About 200 millirems of that comes from radon gas, a colorless, odorless by - product of natural uranium, found in trace amounts almost everywhere.
LEU fuel is more compact than natural uranium fuel and would thus take up less space in the core.
But simply running the reactor on its natural uranium fuel would yield about 10 kilograms of plutonium a year, enough for one or two atomic bombs.
The thorium mined at Baley is likely to have a different set of decay products than the uranium minerals (which typically contain a mix of uranium isotopes called «natural uranium» - or «u-nat» - a mixture of the isotopes uranium - 235, uranium - 234 and uranium - 238 commonly found in nature) mined at US, German and South Africa sites.
Cylinders containing natural uranium, in the form of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), arrive at an enrichment facility, where they are inspected and sampled.
In natural uranium, U-235 is found in concentrations around 0.7 %.
He is responsible for the Company's revenue generation from the sale of enriched and natural uranium, for managing relationships with customers.
Muons, Inc., a private - sector high - energy accelerator physics firm, and ADNA (Accelerator - Driven Neutron Applications) Corp., are proposing using spent nuclear fuel (SNF), natural uranium, or excess weapons - grade plutonium (W - Pu) in a proposed GEM * STAR accelerator - driven subcritical reactor (ADSR) to provide... Read more →
In 1999, Russia entered into a sales agreement with three Western companies for that natural uranium.
Craft, E.S., Abu - Qare, A.W., Flaherty, M.M., Garofolo, M.C., Rincavage, H.L., Abou - Donia, M.B. «Depleted and Natural Uranium: Chemistry and Toxicological Effects» (2004) Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 7:297 - 317.
Under terms of the contract, as amended in 1996, United States Enrichment Corporation (i) purchased the enrichment portion of the blended - down material and sold it to its electric utility customers for use in fabricating fuel for their commercial nuclear power plants, and (ii) transferred to TENEX a quantity of natural uranium equal to the natural uranium component of the low enriched uranium.