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Next-generation nuclear fuel may be too hot to handle: report
Paris (AFP) April 9, 2008 New high-efficiency nuclear fuel meant to burn longer and stronger may prove unstable in an emergency and hard to dispose of, according experts cited in a report published Wednesday. By further enriching the uranium used to power nuclear reactors, operators have been able to extract more electricity from a given amount of fuel, a measure expressed in gigawatt-days per tonne of uranium (GWd/tU). Ramping up fuel efficiency has worked especially well in the pressurised water and boiling water reactors used in the United States and elsewhere. The objective has been to extract more power from fuel and produce less radioactive waste, one of the most vexing problems associated with nuclear energy. A new generation of nuclear plants in the United States and Britain is poised to use reactors designed for "burn-up rates" of 60 GWd/tU, according to the British weekly New Scientist, which canvassed experts. "At these rates, uranium fuel rods should burn for around a year longer than today's best burn-up fuel," the magazine said. But tests conducted by Michael Billone at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, presented last month at a conference in Washington, showed that burn-up rates above 45 GWd/tU would violate US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) safety standards unless new methods were devised for packaging the fuel, the magazine reported. A sudden loss of cooling water -- as happened during the partial meltdown of a reactor core in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania -- would pose such a danger, according to the simulations. The US nuclear energy's Electric Power Research Institute says that such a loss of coolant is not possible in modern reactors, but the NRC has still launched a three-year review of its safety standards. "We are actively preparing to revise NRC's safety criteria to account for the burn-up effect," a commission spokesman told New Scientist. Disposal is also a potential problem because the new, high-efficiency fuel is up to 50 percent more radioactive than fuel currently in use, thus generating far more heat during storage. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links Civil Nuclear Energy Science, Technology and News Powering The World in the 21st Century at Energy-Daily.com
Gas leakage kills two at Pakistan nuclear plant, say officials
Islamabad (AFP) April 8, 2008Two workers were killed Tuesday after a gas leakage at a Pakistani nuclear facility, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission said in a statement. |
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