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Advanced Fission Technologies and Systems
Published in William J. Nuttall, Nuclear Renaissance, 2022
It is in this respect that the attributes of the BREST concept as a nuclear waste burner come to the fore. One step identified by the FAEA is the need for americium and curium recycling. The BREST fast reactor has the capacity to incinerate such isotopes (fast neutron fission) and to help transmute the legacy wastes of the conventional Russian nuclear power programme. Minatom/FAEA has also identified the need to co-extract long-lived radium-226 and thorium-230 isotopes for special handling. The bulk of the residual radiological burden would consist of uranium emerging from reprocessing. Minatom suggests that this uranium should all be regarded as fuel for future power generation, given that a wide range of actinide isotopes are useful in a fast reactor fuel cycle.
Elucidating of the influence of tin and cadmium in the Bi–Pb alloy on its thermal and nuclear properties as a coolant in fast neutron reactors
Published in Radiation Effects and Defects in Solids, 2023
Samah Dahy, T. Z. Amer, R. M. El Shazly, N. S. Gomaa, A. A. Bahgat
Regardless of the design of a nuclear reactor, heat removal from the core is one of the fundamental problems to be addressed. Heat removal is determined by the energy generation in the core, the characteristics of the reactor and the coolant material. Various coolant media have been studied and used around the world. The idea of a liquid metal-cooled fast nuclear reactor goes back to the very earliest days of atomic energy, beginning even with one of the very first plants in the U.S., the experimental breeder reactor (EBR-I) (1), which began operation in 1951, was the first liquid-metal (sodium) cooled reactor in the world. It was followed by the sodium-cooled reactor in the U.S. Navy’s second nuclear-powered submarine, USS Seawolf (SSN 575) (2). The U.S. had also explored using Pb and Pb-Bi as a coolant for fast reactors coolants offer a number of attractive properties: chemical passivity with air and water (contrary to sodium), low vapor pressure over the applicable temperature range, high boiling point (in contrast to sodium), high atomic number and promising neutronics in high scattering and small absorption microscopic cross sections, but ultimately selected sodium due to shorter doubling time to produce plutonium ‘Pu’, and operational and corrosion issues associated with Pb (3). Russia continued to work with Pb-coolant-based reactors and pioneered Pb-Bi-cooled reactors culminating in the deployment of their Alpha class submarines (4), the fastest submarine in the Russian fleet. They improved upon this technology with the design of a Pb-cooled commercial power-generating reactor, called BREST (5), which can generate up to 1200 MWe. The Russians are marketing the Pb-cooled BREST reactor for commercial electricity generation (5). It was these Russian advances that sparked an interest in the Western world to investigate this type of reactor for future energy production which can operate with one core loading for many years and does not require any fuel reprocessing. In addition to reactor systems, heavy-liquid-metals (HLMs) (6) are of interest as targets for high-energy spallation sources in subcritical accelerator-driven systems (ADS) (7). These systems are being studied for the important role they can play in the nuclear fuel cycle via the transmutation of radioactive waste produced during the operation of nuclear reactors. By reducing the inventory of long-lived, radiological material, these systems will reduce propagation risks by plutonium inventory reduction and decrease the radiological load on the proposed geologic waste repository while enabling a more effective use of existing repository space (8). On the other hand, it is expected to be a superior choice due to post nuclear accident, where those types of heavy metals would act as a good biological shielding against radiation leakage hazardous.