Fuel
Unlike light-water reactors (LWRs), TWRs use only a small amount (~10%) of enriched uranium-235 or other fissile fuel to initiate the nuclear reaction. The remainder of the fuel consists of natural or depleted uranium-238, which can generate power continuously for 40 years or more and remains sealed in the reactor vessel during that time. TWRs require substantially less fuel per kilowatt-hour of electricity than do LWRs, owing to TWRs' higher fuel burnup, energy density and thermal efficiency. A TWR also accomplishes most of its reprocessing "on the fly" within the reactor core. Spent fuel can subsequently be recycled after simple "melt refining", without the chemical separation of plutonium that is required by other kinds of breeder reactors. These features greatly reduce fuel and waste volumes while enhancing proliferation resistance.
Depleted uranium is widely available as a feedstock. Stockpiles in the United States currently contain approximately 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium, which is left as a byproduct of the enrichment process. TerraPower has estimated that the Paducah enrichment facility stockpile alone represents an energy resource equivalent to $100 trillion worth of electricity. TerraPower has also estimated that wide deployment of TWRs could enable projected global stockpiles of depleted uranium to sustain 80% of the world's population at U.S. per capita energy usages for over a millennium.
In principle, TWRs are capable of burning spent fuel from LWRs, which is currently discarded as radioactive waste. Spent LWR fuel is mostly depleted uranium and, in a TWR fast-neutron spectrum, the neutron absorption cross-section of fission products is several orders of magnitude smaller than in a LWR thermal-neutron spectrum. While such an approach could actually bring about an overall reduction in nuclear waste stockpiles, additional technical development would be required to realize this capability.
TWRs are also capable, in principle, of reusing their own fuel. In any given cycle of operation, only 20–35% of the fuel gets converted to an unusable form; the remaining metal constitutes usable fissile material. Recast and reclad into new driver pellets without chemical separations, this recycled fuel can be used to initiate fission in subsequent cycles of operation, thus displacing the need to enrich uranium altogether.
Read more about this topic: Traveling Wave Reactor
Famous quotes containing the word fuel:
“The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry “AFRIKA!”/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and go home to thy “Gunsmoke,” to/thy “Gilligan’s Island” and the NFL.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)