«I believe there is a desire there [in China] to
use fast reactor technology to extend their energy base and enhance their energy security position.
Poneman said Monju came up in the discussions because of the possibility of
using fast reactors to burn plutonium and the long - lived isotopes of elements such as neptunium and americium that account for much of the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste.
Fast reactors feature in Russia's long - term nuclear energy plans, which envisage a move to inherently safe nuclear plants
using fast reactors with a closed fuel cycle and mixed - oxide (MOX) fuel.
Not exact matches
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.
It could be stashed away for future
use as
fast -
reactor fuel.
An Outdated Strategy Early nuclear engineers expected that the plutonium in the spent fuel of thermal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.
We understand that their first
fast reactors will
use oxide or carbide fuel rather than metal — a less than optimum path, chosen presumably because the PUREX reprocessing technology is mature, whereas pyroprocessing has not yet been commercially demonstrated.
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.
Using a different
reactor shape than ITER and, eventually, superconducting magnets, the company says it has a cheaper and
faster path to an energy - producing fusion reaction.
The radioactive material was reprocessed by the French company Cogema in La Hague and will be
used in Japan's
fast - breeder nuclear
reactor programme.
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.
One solution under consideration is to recycle the plutonium yet further — by
using it as fuel in a pair of new, so - called «
fast»
reactors.
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.
Novel design The trouble with
fast reactors has largely been related to what's
used to cool them — liquid sodium in the case of GE's PRISM and many others.
PRISM is a sodium - cooled, high - energy neutron (
fast)
reactor design that
uses a series of proven, safe and mature technologies developed in the U.S. and abroad.
PRISM is a high energy neutron (
fast)
reactor which
uses a series of proven, safe and mature technologies to create an innovative solution to dispose of
used nuclear fuel and surplus plutonium.
This means that the bonus neutrons can be
used to breed new fuel in
fast breeder
reactors.
Another good reason to
use hexagons is that
fast reactors can become more reactive when fuel is pushed closer together.
«Unlike today's nuclear
reactor, the IFR [integral
fast reactor] can generate unlimited amounts of inexpensive clean power for hundreds of thousands of years... It provides an excellent solution for what to do with our nuclear waste because it can
use our existing nuclear waste for fuel and it is significantly more proliferation - resistant than other methods of dealing with nuclear waste... The IFR is also inherently safe.
An application case representative of an assembly of the low void effect sodium
fast reactor ASTRID is
used to study the physics of this kind of system, illustrating the interesting capabilities provided by this approach and highlighting new possible calculation schemes.
Fast reactors on a closed fuel cycle
use nearly all the actinides fed into them, while low energy
reactors use only around one percent of the fuel.
One fact that Loewen pointed out that enabled greater fuel
use by the PRISM (or any
fast spectrum
reactor) is that all neutron cross-sections are one Barn.
«You get this beautiful synergy of
using PRISM, a small modular
reactor, to fix a [waste] problem and then explore if we could
use this to make all this other electricity with the integral
fast reactor approach,» he explains.
JAEA chairman Toshio Kodama said, «In addition to effectively utilizing the results of our research and development - including the results obtained through the development of Monju so far for future
fast reactor development - we will contribute to the development of state - of - the - art
fast reactors in Japan by making maximum
use of the human resources and equipment, etc of this organization according to the established «
fast reactor development policy».»
PRISM is a high energy neutron (
fast)
reactor design which
uses a series of proven, safe and mature technologies to provide an innovative solution to disposition plutonium stockpiles and harness the remaining energy potential of
used nuclear fuel and surplus plutonium.
«Now these
fast reactors — they can
use all that depleted uranium for fuel.
Each dollar spent on a new
reactor buys about two to ten times less carbon savings and is 20 to 40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper,
faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient
use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings («cogeneration»), and renewable energy.
The TWR is a liquid sodium - cooled
fast reactor that
uses depleted or natural uranium as fuel.
Fast neutron
reactors are typically fuelled
using a mixture of oxides of uranium and plutonium, and can vastly increase the efficiency of the nuclear fuel cycle by
using the uranium - 238 recovered from recycling nuclear fuel after
use in conventional nuclear power
reactors.
And nuclear power is just as sustainable as any other power source — even if we only
use conventional nuclear
fast reactor designs, there is enough uranium in the oceans and on land (recoverable at prices that allow the fuel costs of
fast reactors to remain the same as today — which is trivial) to last for 5 billlion years, the expected time remaining fo our sun.
Under previously announced plans, deployment of PWRs is expected to level off at 200 GWe by around 2040, with the
use of
fast reactors progressively increasing from 2020 to at least 200 GWe by 2050 and 1400 GWe by 2100.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-China-plans-for-nuclear-growth-2011144.html
Fast reactors — make maximum
use of uranium resources by generating a certain amount more fuel than they consume — are seen as the main technology for China's long - term
use of nuclear energy.
It compels the DOE to build an experimental
fast reactor,
using an experimental fuel, at a scale and power density that has never been demonstrated, on a rushed schedule, with insufficient funding.
(The DOE also is apparently considering a different
fast reactor design that would
use high - assay, low - enriched uranium fuel, but this material is in short supply and a new production source would have to be established.