Very High Temperature Reactor - History

History

The HTGR design was first proposed by the staff of the Power Pile Division of the Clinton Laboratories (known now as Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in 1947. Professor Dr. Rudolf Schulten in Germany also played a role in development during the 1950s. The Peach Bottom reactor in the United States was the first HTGR to produce electricity, and did so very successfully, with operation from 1966 through 1974 as a technology demonstrator. Fort St. Vrain Generating Station was one example of this design that operated as an HTGR from 1979 to 1989; though the reactor was beset by some problems which led to its decommissioning due to economic factors, it served as proof of the HTGR concept in the United States (though no new commercial HTGRs have been developed there since). HTGRs have also existed in the United Kingdom (the Dragon reactor) and Germany (AVR reactor and THTR-300), and currently exist in Japan (the HTTR using prismatic fuel with 30 MWth of capacity) and China (the HTR-10, a pebble-bed design with 10 MWe of generation). Two full-scale pebble-bed HTGRs HTR-PM, each with 100 - 195 MWe of electrical production capacity are under construction in China as of November 2009, and are promoted in several countries by reactor designers.

Read more about this topic:  Very High Temperature Reactor

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
    —Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    “We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
    —Milan Kundera (b. 1929)