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Nuclear and Hydro Power
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Energy Security for The 21st Century, 2021
Note: Pb-207 is the final stable decay product of U-235, and Pb-206 is that of U-238, while Pb-204 is non-radiogenic. Uranium decays slowly by emitting alpha particles. The half-life of uranium-238 is about 4.47 billion years and that of uranium-235 is 704 million years.
The Other Energy Markets
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Global Energy Market Trends, 2021
Commercial nuclear power plants use fuel that is typically enriched to around 3% uranium-235. The CANDU and Magnox reactor designs are the only commercial reactors capable of using un-enriched uranium fuel. Fuel used in United States Navy reactors is typically highly enriched uranium-235 (the exact values of this fuel are classified, but is believed to be well over 3%).
Nuclear Power Generation
Published in Takashiro Akitsu, Environmental Science, 2018
Uranium has isotopes with mass numbers 238 and 235. Uranium mines contain about 99.3% of uranium 238 and about 0.7% of uranium 235. Of these, uranium 235 is a radioactive isotope that undergoes fission, which is used as a nuclear fuel in nuclear reactors and is the main material of nuclear weapons.
Design of a Fast Molten Salt Reactor for Space Nuclear Electric Propulsion
Published in Nuclear Science and Engineering, 2023
F. Quinteros, P. Rubiolo, V. Ghetta, J. Giraud, N. Capellan
Uranium-235 is used as fissile fuel rather than 239Pu because of the relatively low chemical toxicity and radiotoxicity of 235U, which will result in lower risk in the case of launching or reentry accidents. Two distinct levels of fuel enrichment are considered in this study: (1) a first reactor design using a 20% enriched uranium fuel called in this work LEU design and (2) a second design using a 92% enriched uranium fuel called HEU design. While HEU fuel allows obtaining a more compact (and thus lower mass) fast reactor design than LEU fuel, the current policies in the United States and the growing consensus among nuclear experts is that only LEU-fueled space reactors are a viable option given proliferation concerns (Ref. 3). In this study, we will keep these two reactor designs (LEU and HEU) for comparing their performance. The thermal power output is set to 1 MW in both designs, which is about the highest power density compatible with the materials selection of the LEU concept as is discussed in Sec. IV.A.1. The main core parameters of the LEU and HEU designs are presented in Table I.