Sentences with phrase «thermal reactors»

Although thermal reactors generate heat and thus electricity quite efficiently, they can not minimize the output of radioactive waste.

This is the main reason why thermal reactors were developed first.

This also explains why initial enrichment of fast reactors has to be higher than comparable thermal reactors.

This is what is done in thermal reactors.

An Outdated Strategy Early nuclear engineers expected that the plutonium in the spent fuel of thermal reactors would be removed and then used in fast - neutron reactors,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.

This fact means that the used fuel from current thermal reactors still has the potential to stoke many a nuclear fire.

Fast reactors using uranium fuel inherently create more fissile atoms per fission that uranium - fueled thermal reactors.

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

Most existing nuclear power plants contain what are called thermal reactors, which are driven by neutrons of relatively low speed (or energy) ricocheting within their cores.

Some people are advocating that the U.S. embark on an extensive program of PUREX processing of reactor fuel, making mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium for cycling back into thermal reactors.

RIAR's reactors provide a full range of capabilities to test fuel and materials of all types of existing power reactors as well as advanced and innovative ones: water - cooled thermal reactors, including those with boiling and pressurized water, gas - cooled, fast and other types of reactors.

Uranium was found to be plentiful, and the commercial nuclear industry favored the already - developed and operating thermal reactors.

Since the probability of fission is lower for faster energies for every actinide, the neutron density is higher in fast reactors than it is in most thermal reactors of the same power (since power is effectively the neutron density multiplied by the fission probability).

So the real question is why are thermal reactor assemblies square?

Technologies being developed and tested in Australia include parabolic troughs and dishes, power towers, solar arrays and solar thermal reactors.

As an added bonus, many of the very long - lived nuclides larger than Uranium (Neptunium, Plutonium, Americium, Curium, etc.) have the same trend, and fast reactors can split and destroy these actinides as fuel rather than let them accumulate as in thermal reactors.

This concentrated atomic assault allows the reactor to extract 100 times as much energy from uranium fuel as do current thermal reactors, which use less than 1 percent of the fuel's potential energy.

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.

In a thermal reactor, the neutrons, which are born fast, are slowed (or moderated) by interactions with nearby low - atomicweight atoms, such as the hydrogen in the water that flows through reactor cores.

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.

Structural materials inside fast reactors thus undergo higher radiation damage rates than those in thermal reactors.

In reality, it's very difficult to keep the neutrons moving that quickly so fast reactors still need a bit of enriched uranium to operate, but U-238 is fissioned to much more of a degree than in thermal reactors.

In thermal reactors, Pu239 fissions as soon as it is created because the Pu239 fission rate is so much higher than the U238 absorption rate (which is what creates fissile material).

Fast reactors, in contrast to thermal reactors, utilize fast neutrons for a sustained fission chain reaction.