Sentences with phrase «spent reactor fuel»

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.

Use of standard LWR fuel allows leveraging extensive experience and infrastructure for the storage, handling, and shipment of spent reactor fuel.

Reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi station runs on so - called mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, in which uranium is mixed with other fissile materials such as plutonium from spent reactor fuel or from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

MIT physics professor Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and co-chairman of the spent fuel study, said that until now, U.S. policy on the disposition of spent reactor fuel has been an «afterthought.»

Spent reactor fuel may be either a waste or a resource, and it may take decades to find out which is true, the report authors conclude.

Not exact matches

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A plan to temporarily store tons of spent fuel from U.S. commercial nuclear reactors in New Mexico is drawing fire from critics who say the federal government needs to consider more alternatives.

The Federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act has mandated that deep - mine disposal of high - level radioactive effluent and spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors commence by 1998, but states with proposed geological sites are screaming foul.

It is commonly recognized that the radioactivity and extreme toxicity of nuclear reactor postfission effluent and spent fuel rods constitute a hazard to human health and safety.

At present 5,900 tons of high - level waste (HLW) in the form of spent fuel assemblies are sitting in pools next to operating reactors, together with 75 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, plus 27 million cubic feet of trans - uranic waste (TRU).

February 21, 2005: Seoul's semi-official Yonhap News Agency reports that South Korea's defense minister, Yoon Kwang - ung, tells a National Assembly Committee that North Korea has reprocessed «only part» of the 8,000 spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor.

Of all the terrible news from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, reports about the spent fuel storage pool for reactor # 4 may be among the most disconcerting for scientists.

As ProPublica reported earlier, fire safety is a continuing concern at the country's 104 commercial reactors, as is the volume of spent fuel piling up at plants.

As NRC staff noted during the Fukushima emergency, when there was concern that the spent - fuel pool at Unit 4 may have lost its cooling water as well as been damaged by the reactor building explosion, adding cold water to already hot fuel can create a problem in its own right.

Spent fuel from Sizewell B, Britain's first pressurised water reactor, will not be sent to Sellafield for reprocessing.

The nation's 104 reactors generate roughly 800 billion kilowatt - hours a year and contribute about 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel a year.

Japan's nuclear plant crisis with the radioactivity contamination from spent fuel pools is likely to put an overdue spotlight on stalemated U.S. policies for managing reactor fuel, authors of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the nuclear fuel cycle said yesterday.

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to new requirements to safeguard spent fuel pools at U.S. reactors, but the overall policy toward the nuclear fuel cycle has been bound up in the fight over the proposed fuel repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, which the Obama administration wants to terminate.

With no permanent waste repository in sight, the nuclear industry is storing spent fuel at reactor sites.

Transfers of casks from operating reactors could follow, and the report authors said that would help resolve a long - running court dispute over payments nuclear plant operators are required to make to the federal government in return for federal storage of the spent fuel — a bargain the federal government has not kept.

The evaluations must ensure that backup cooling systems for reactors and spent fuel pools can operate for a long time in «blackout» conditions, where on - site and off - site power is cut off.

It is likely to increase the already hefty cost of building reactors and increase the complaints of regulators and nearby communities that are already upset at the storage of spent fuel rods, Mariotte said.

And a fire at a pool storing spent fuel rods at dormant reactor No. 4 is posing additional hazards to the few workers remaining at the site.

They say enriching uranium at a processing plant poses less risk than handling spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive, at a reactor.

Notably, that schedule is reasonably compatible with the planned timetable for shipment of spent thermal - reactor fuel to Yucca Mountain.

Because the world's uranium supply is finite and the continued growth in the numbers of thermal reactors could exhaust the available low - cost uranium reserves in a few decades, it makes little sense to discard this spent fuel or the «tailings» left over from the enrichment process.

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.

An Outdated Strategy Early nuclear engineers expected that the plutonium in the spent fuel of thermal reactors would be removed and then used in fast - neutron reactors, called fast breeders because they were designed to produce more plutonium than they consume.

After all, the spent fuel pools that may have been exposed by the power plant explosions contain more than 200 metric tons of used uranium fuel rods that have been cooling for weeks, months or even years — and smoke or steam continues to billow from the exposed spent fuel pool of reactor No. 3.

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.

A second major issue at Fukushima is how to handle the fuel 3/4 the melted uranium cores as well as spent and unused fuel rods stored at the reactors.

The NRC analysis found that a fire in a spent - fuel pool at an average nuclear reactor site would cause $ 125 billion in damages, while expedited transfer of spent fuel to dry casks could reduce radioactive releases from pool fires by 99 percent.

Jaczko told the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee that measures to protect both U.S. reactor operations and the spent fuel pools have been taken on a case - by - case basis for each U.S. reactor since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The fire in the spent fuel store of reactor unit 4 has probably released the worst of the radioactive materials so far.

Moreover, the authors suggest that states that provide subsidies to uneconomical nuclear reactors within their borders could also play a constructive role by making those subsidies available only for plants that agreed to carry out expedited transfer of spent fuel.

The problem of spent fuel storage Nuclear reactor operators must store spent fuel removed from reactor cores for several years at least, in large pools at reactor sites until the remaining heat from the uranium fuel cools sufficiently.

«The Fukushima accident could have been a hundred times worse had there been a loss of the water covering the spent fuel in pools associated with each reactor,» von Hippel said.

• Of greatest concern are the spent fuel rods stored at reactor Nos. 3 and 4.

When auxiliary batteries were exhausted, the plant was without power to continue cooling reactor cores and spent fuel pools.

The top U.S. nuclear regulator, Gregory Jaczko, gave a dire assessment of Japan's nuclear crisis yesterday, saying that lethal radiation from uncovered spent fuel above one of the reactors could force emergency workers to abandon their fight to prevent meltdowns of damaged reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said his staff in Tokyo had been told by Japanese utility officials that cooling water that normally covers spent fuel was nearly or totally gone from an uncovered concrete pool above reactor Unit 4.

It notes that a storage facility that could hold spent fuel for several decades while it cools could free up space in reactors» pools, lowering the risk of overheating, loss of coolant, and fires.

The fuel had been moved from reactor No. 4's core to its spent - fuel pool recently, so «that fuel is relatively fresh and hotter, thermally,» Resnikoff explained.

As of midday Thursday, the country's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency spokesperson Yoshitaka Nagayama, noted that «because we have been unable to go to the scene, we can not confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at reactor No. 4,» The New York Times reported.

The Japanese plant has endured partial meltdowns in at least three of its six reactors, as well as two of its seven pools for storing spent fuel.

And whether or not the 50 tons of water dumped on reactor No. 3 was enough to temporarily cool the spent fuel pool, the efforts will need to continue to avoid a significant release of radiation.

• Structural integrity of the spent fuel pools was unknown for reactor Nos. 1 and 2; • Reactor Nos. 3 and 4 had low water levels; pool temperature was continuing to rise for reactor Nos. 5 and 6.

In 2010, the Obama administration abandoned a 2 - decade effort to bury much of the high level waste — spent fuel rods from commercial reactors and radioactive material from nuclear bomb manufacturing — inside Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert (although Congress has ordered parts of that process to keep moving).

The most damaged Daiichi reactor, number 3, contains about 90 tons of fuel, and the storage pool above reactor 4, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) Gregory Jaczko reported yesterday had lost its cooling water, contains 135 tons of spent fuel.

This left 35 kilograms of spent fuel from the Soviet reactor and the French Tammuz 2 reactor.

The Fukushima Daiichi site in total has some 11,000 such fuel rods in the seven spent fuel pools — 500 or more of which in reactor No. 4's spent fuel pool are still quite hot having only been removed from that reactor in December, according to The New York Times.