Sentences with phrase «used sodium coolant»

Dounreay also suffered an explosion at its dumping ground for used sodium coolant that may have contributed to radioactive particles from spent fuel turning up on nearby beaches.

Not exact matches

Hence, engineers typically use a liquid metal such as sodium as a coolant and heat transporter.

Then there is the question mark over the use of highly reactive sodium as the coolant.

Instead of water, liquid sodium is typically used as a coolant because the sodium atoms are so much larger and heavier than neutrons that when they collide the neutrons simply ricochet off the sodium atom - much a like a small bullet ricocheting off a thick plate metal.

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is developing the Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular (PRISM) reactor, which uses liquid sodium as a coolant.

An additional feature of metal fuel use in sodium is that the fuel does not chemically react with the coolant compared to oxide fuel pellets which dissolve in high temperature sodium.

The use of sodium coolant rather than a water coolant enables higher burn - up.

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.

«What it does is it takes different sorts of fuel materials such as plutonium or used nuclear fuel, it casts that into a metallic fuel, it puts it in a reactor that has liquid sodium as a coolant — and if you have liquid sodium as a coolant then the energies of the neutrons are higher so you can use a different fuel source.