Sentences with phrase «use uranium fuel»

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

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.

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.

Reprocessing and the use of plutonium as reactor fuel are also far more expensive than using uranium fuel and disposing of the spent fuel directly.

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.

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 issue concerns what to do with radioactive waste after uranium and plutonium have been recovered from spent nuclear fuel using reprocessing methods such as Plutonium Uranium Redox EXtraction (uranium and plutonium have been recovered from spent nuclear fuel using reprocessing methods such as Plutonium Uranium Redox EXtraction (Uranium Redox EXtraction (PUREX).

To reprocess them, the used fuel is first dissolved in acid and the plutonium and uranium separated.

The Bulletin acknowledges that the increased use of carbon - free nuclear energy could help mitigate global warming brought on by fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions but concludes that the possibility of misusing enriched uranium and separated plutonium to create bombs is a «terrible trade - off» for trying to control climate change.

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

The 3.7 - meter - long nuclear fuel used at Fukushima is composed of uranium oxide pellets encased in a zirconium cladding.

In addition, only about one tenth of the mined uranium ore is converted into fuel in the enrichment process (during which the concentration of uranium 235 is increased considerably), so less than a hundredth of the ore's total energy content is used to generate power in today's plants.

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.

Earl Lane / AAAS There is enough highly enriched uranium on hand to fuel non-weapon uses of the fissile material for a century, a nonproliferation...

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.

From 12 August, British Nuclear Fuels is allowed to test the performance of its thermal oxide reprocessing plant at Sellafield using uranium and uranium compounds «derived from natural or depleted uranium».

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?

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.

The contaminated sites, on floodplains in the upper Colorado River basin, operated from the 1940s to the 1970s to produce «yellowcake,» a precursor of uranium fuel used in nuclear power plants and weapons.

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.

PHWRs are similar to PWRs, but use raw uranium rather than enriched uranium oxide as fuel, and deploy heavy water — in which hydrogen is replaced by deuterium — as both moderator and coolant.

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.

The fuel is enriched uranium oxide, and water is used both as a coolant and as a moderator.

And that you don't run out of uranium, that is you don» peak your fuel price, so if you say to the whole world, «Hey, let's all use these things you don't mess up your economics»cause of a uranium shortage.

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.

Essentially all nuclear fuel recycling is performed using a process known as PUREX (plutonium uranium extraction), which was initially developed for extracting pure plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Using passive safety, digital instrumentation and control, and modular fabrication techniques to expedite plant construction, the design uses metallic fuel, such as an alloy of zirconium, uranium, and plutonium.

That's because the CANDU design uses heavy water, which enables the use of natural (i.e., unenriched) uranium as fuel.

These are used to separate and quantify uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel and liquid waste tanks, and measure trace and major elements in liquid and solid matrices (e.g., alloy compositions, or environmental monitoring samples).

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.

Instead, the price rise seems to reflect the increasing importance of the secondary, or pre-mined and processed market, as sources of uranium for use in the reactor fuel market.

There are more than 440 operating nuclear power reactors worldwide, most of which use enriched uranium for fuel, including 99 reactors in the United States.

HEU can be blended with other forms of uranium in a series of complex technologies that result in dilution of the concentration of U-235 from the 90 % range in HEU down to the three to five percent used in reactor fuel.

The use of uranium enrichment tailings for reactor fuel through the «re-enrichment» of UET is not yet a significant world source of uranium for reactor fuel, except in the Russian Federation.

«Highly enriched uranium» (HEU) is made for use in nuclear weapons and is created when the content of uranium - 235 (U-235), the isotope of uranium that is fissionable and therefore necessary to make nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor fuel, is enriched.

Muons, Inc., a private - sector high - energy accelerator physics firm, and ADNA (Accelerator - Driven Neutron Applications) Corp., are proposing using spent nuclear fuel (SNF), natural uranium, or excess weapons - grade plutonium (W - Pu) in a proposed GEM * STAR accelerator - driven subcritical reactor (ADSR) to provide... Read more →

There are serious proliferation risks associated with uranium enrichment and the use of plutonium as a fuel.

For two decades, up to 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using low enriched uranium from the Megatons to Megawatts program.

These documents also indicate that the fuel used in the PRISM reactor will contain a combination of recycled uranium, plutonium and zirconium.

It could also make use of other materials the UK Government wishes to disposition including reprocessed uranium and unused fuel from past nuclear reactor programs.

The uranium can then be used to form the nuclear fuel in the PRISM reactor.

Virtually the entire U.S. nuclear reactor fleet participated in this program by using fuel fabricated with low enriched uranium from the Megatons to Megawatts program.

Under terms of the contract, as amended in 1996, United States Enrichment Corporation (i) purchased the enrichment portion of the blended - down material and sold it to its electric utility customers for use in fabricating fuel for their commercial nuclear power plants, and (ii) transferred to TENEX a quantity of natural uranium equal to the natural uranium component of the low enriched uranium.

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.

These thermal neutron reactors typically use uranium - 235 as the main component in the nuclear fuel.