Sentences with phrase «used nuclear fuel rods»

This problem continues to grow because there remains no place for used nuclear fuel rod storage other than such pools or massive dry casks — both located on nuclear facility grounds.

Not exact matches

To use MOX fuel rods, civilian power plants would have to modify their reactors, requiring lengthy relicensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Critics question the announcement, but a cold shutdown is when water used to cool nuclear fuel rods remains below boiling point, preventing the fuel from reheating

In the U.S., the plan to use Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert as a repository for spent nuclear fuel rods is in limbo, opposed by the Obama administration.

The pools — water - filled basins that store and cool used radioactive fuel rods — are so densely packed with nuclear waste that a fire could release enough radioactive material to contaminate an area twice the size of New Jersey.

The question that should be asked is why zirconium is still used in cladding for nuclear fuel rods after being implicated in the Three Mile Island disaster.

Because of the harsh environment fuel rods are exposed to — heat, steam, and neutrons that emanate from nuclear reactions — extensive further testing will be needed on any new cladding for use in commercial reactors, Kazimi says.

That hydrogen buildup was the result of hot steam coming into contact with overheated nuclear fuel rods covered by a cladding of zirconium alloy, or «zircaloy» — the material used as fuel - rod cladding in all water - cooled nuclear reactors, which constitute more than 90 percent of the world's power reactors.

And the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2006 suggested the practice of overcrowding pools for the storage of spent nuclear fuel rods — that has caused fires and explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, which stores far less used fuel than typical U.S. plants — could prove dangerous.

In the interim — which could stretch for a century — used fuel rods will remain where they are: at nuclear power plants themselves either in spent fuel pools or in giant concrete casks on pads.

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.

Response: SMR - 160 uses commonly available nuclear fuel pellets in zircaloy tubes (fuel rods) manufactured by many qualified suppliers around the world.

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.

«Whenever the government loses a lawsuit, money just magically comes out of the Judgement Fund,» Rod McCullum, senior director of the Nuclear Energy Institute's (NEI's) Used Fuel and Decommissioning arm, told POWER in February.