Sentences with phrase «uranium reactor fuel»

Some types of uranium reactor fuel could in theory be useful in weapons, while plutonium - also theoretically useful for weaponry - is created during operation.

Not exact matches

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.

Indian Point's nuclear power is neither clean nor green, and the process needed to create fuel from uranium for its reactors is energy - intensive and creates greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

The reactor uses uranium dioxide fuel particles that are also coated with graphite so they will not crack and release fission products even in extreme heat.

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.

The world's ample supply of uranium could fuel a much larger fleet of reactors than exists today throughout their 40 - to 50 - year life span.

The researchers discovered uranium from nuclear fuel embedded in or associated with caesium - rich micro particles that were emitted from the plant's reactors during the meltdowns.

In 2009, when the reactor was running low on fuel, negotiations broke down over Iran's request to purchase low - enriched uranium fuel plates.

The agency says the Hanford site in southeastern Washington, which manufactured more than 20 million pieces of uranium metal fuel for nine nuclear reactors near the Columbia River, is its biggest cleanup challenge.

Most nuclear reactors use uranium fuel that has been «enriched» in uranium 235, an isotope of uranium that fissions readily.

The nearly completed reactor was designed to use highly enriched uranium (HEU) 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

After about three years of service, when technicians typically remove used fuel from one of today's reactors because of radiation - related degradation and the depletion of the uranium 235, plutonium is contributing more than half the power the plant generates.

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 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.

Found naturally only in trace quantities and seminal to alternate nuclear reactor fuels, protactinium is an extremely rare element that could reveal new trends among nearby actinide elements, including uranium.

Reactors around the world require their fuel to hold anywhere from 3 to 5 percent U235, or 30 to 50 atoms of the fissile isotope per 1,000 atoms of uranium.

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.

But finding enough fuel for existing and new reactors may prove a challenge, as will preventing the health and environmental impacts that have plagued uranium mining.

In addition to trading greenhouse gases, Evolution helps broker deals for biofuels, natural gas, the uranium fuel for nuclear reactors, renewable energy credits, air pollution permits for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, even insurance against bad weather.

With 436 reactors worldwide consuming 65,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of enriched uranium per year, demand for this nuclear reactor fuel outstrips available supply, which has caused uranium prices to jump from a low of $ 10 per pound a few years ago to more than $ 130 per pound in 2007 and still more than $ 50 per pound today.

In fact, during that period more than half the uranium fuel that powered the more than 100 reactors in the U.S. came from such reprocessed nuclear weapons.

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.

M.I.T. nuclear engineer Charles Forsberg, another co-chair of the report, noted that a typical light - water reactor in the U.S. needs 200 metric tons of mined uranium resulting in 20 metric tons of uranium fuel per year.

One of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi reactors contains a blend of uranium and plutonium fuel that may soon find use in the U.S. Does it pose more risks than standard uranium fuel?

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.

Rather than the pellets of uranium oxide used in other fast reactors and conventional reactors as fuel, GE would fabricate metal alloy fuels, with the plutonium or uranium mixed with zirconium metal.

Heavy, silvery - white, toxic, metallic, naturally radioactive, pyrophoric, and teratogenic uranium belongs to the actinide series and its isotope 235U is used as the fuel for nuclear reactors and the explosive material for nuclear weapons.

Standard reactor design helps fuel a boom After testing their first nuclear weapon in 1960, the French turned their infrastructure for enriching and processing uranium toward energy.

One attractive feature of fast reactors is that they can produce more fuel than they consume, avoiding the issue of the limited supplies of the uranium used in conventional nuclear reactors.

Light water - cooled graphite - moderated reactors Fuelled by low - enriched uranium oxide, these reactors use graphite as a moderator and water to cool 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.

WATCHMAN can indicate whether a reactor is active and where it is but not the precise mix of fuel, such as highly enriched plutonium and uranium.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection has assembled a special team to assess the risk of water pollution and to investigate potential problems at the undisclosed number of nuclear reactors in Sichuan, where uranium fuel is produced.

Joint projects with Russian nuclear scientists began to ebb soon after President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and reached a nadir last October when Russia suspended an agreement with the United States on nuclear R&D cooperation and terminated another on retooling Russian research reactors to no longer run on weapons - grade uranium fuel.

The world's first commercial - size fast reactor, the BN - 600 near Ekaterinburg in the central Urals, began operating in 1980 on a fuel of enriched uranium.

An optimized closed (fast - reactor) fuel cycle would recycle not just the uranium and plutonium but all actinides in the fuel, including neptunium, americium and curium.

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

The uranium and plutonium are used to fabricate mixed oxide fuel for use in light - water reactors.

Uranium mined from the earth contains only 0.7 percent (seven - tenths of 1 percent) U-235, the isotope used to fuel nuclear reactors and make bombs.

«For example,» said Clark, «Used fuel, which is currently disposed of in the United States after a single use in a reactor in what is called an open fuel cycle, would be reprocessed to extract out a significant fraction of re-useable uranium.

The study evaluated scenarios with partial and full - core loading of mixed uranium - plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel and confirmed that MOX could be used in the NuScale core with minimal effect on the reactor's design and operation.

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.