Sentences with phrase «uranium fuel rods»

Finally, the global expansion of nuclear power plants should be enabled by some form of leasing program for the uranium fuel rods — one up for renewal every decade or so.

Meanwhile, Japan has struggled to bring its Rokkasho reprocessing plant online, even with the help of Areva, and currently relies on France and the U.K. to recycle its used uranium fuel rods.

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.

Exelon Corp., owner of Nine Mile Point, estimated it would cost about $ 125 million to resupply FitzPatrick with uranium fuel rods next fall, which would allow the plant to continue operating two years beyond when plant owner Entergy Corp. plans to shut it down, the administration official said.

Not exact matches

Plutonium and uranium are converted into chemical compounds called oxides, and mixed together in fuel rods for civilian nuclear power plants.

The back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, mostly spent fuel rods, often contains fission products that emit beta and gamma radiation, and may contain actinides that emit alpha particles, such as uranium - 234, neptunium - 237, plutonium - 238 and americium - 241, and even sometimes some neutron emitters such as Cf.

Enriched uranium is manufactured into fuel rods that are encased in metal cladding made of alloys such as zirconium.

If the fuel rods are no longer being cooled — as has happened at all three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant operating at the time of the earthquake — then the zirconium cladding will swell and crack, releasing the uranium fuel pellets and fission byproducts, such as radioactive cesium and iodine, among others.

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 fuel rods in most cases consist of uranium dioxide pellets encased in zirconium alloy tubes or cladding.

«The fuel rods are long uranium rods clad in a [zirconium alloy casing].

During a nuclear meltdown, uranium dioxide fuel, fuel rod components and even the reactor become superheated — as much as 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit — and melt together to form corium, which can eat through containment systems.

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.

Nuclear fuel rods are made of hundreds of small pellets of enriched uranium placed end - to - end inside hollow tubes of zircaloy that are about a half - inch across.

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.

All other sodium reactors use oxide fuels, while PRISM uses a metal fuel, an alloy of zirconium, uranium, and plutonium, and the fuel rods sit in a bath of liquid sodium at atmospheric pressure.

Unlike the current generation of light - water nuclear reactors, PRISM uses metallic fuel, such as an alloy of zirconium, uranium, and plutonium, and PRISM's fuel rods sit in a bath of a liquid metal — sodium — at atmospheric pressure, which ensures that the transfer of heat from the metal fuel to the liquid sodium coolant is extremely efficient.

• Ceramic process in which uranium oxide powder is used to manufacture pellets; these pellets are inserted into zirconium alloy tubes which, once they are loaded, pressurized and sealed, are called fuel rods.

We used to reprocess spent fuel rods until 1/2 ton of enriched uranium somehow wound up in Israel.