TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor—A new reactor design could make nuclear power safer and cheaper…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22114

March/April 2009

TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor

A new reactor design could make nuclear power safer and cheaper, says John Gilleland.

By Matt Wald

Enriching the uranium for reactor fuel and opening the reactor periodically to refuel it are among the most cumbersome and expensive steps in running a nuclear plant. And after spent fuel is removed from the reactor, reprocessing it to recover usable materials has the same drawbacks, plus two more: the risks of nuclear-weapons proliferation and environmental pollution.

These problems are mostly accepted as a given, but not by a group of researcher­s at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA. The scientists there have come up with a preliminary design for a reactor that requires only a small amount of enriched fuel--that is, the kind whose atoms can easily be split in a chain reaction. It's called a traveling­-wave reactor. And while government researchers intermittently bring out new reactor designs, the traveling-wave reactor is noteworthy for having come from something that barely exists in the nuclear industry: a privately funded research company.

As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs "theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years" without refueling, says John G­illeland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.

Gilleland's aim is to run a nuclear reactor on what is now waste. ­Conventional reactors use uranium-235, which splits easily to carry on a chain reaction but is scarce and expensive; it must be separated from the more common, nonfissile uranium-238 in special enrichment plants. Every 18 to 24 months, the reactor must be opened, hundreds of fuel bundles removed, hundreds added, and the remainder reshuffled to supply all the fissile uranium needed for the next run. This raises proliferation concerns, since an enrichment plant designed to make low-enriched uranium for a power reactor differs trivially from one that makes highly enriched material for a bomb.

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[county worker]

1. I thought that was what cold fission was all about.

Making a dangerous thing safe.

[NNadir]

2. It is difficult to imagine that anything could be much safer than a nuclear reactor of existing

types.

This "traveling wave" doesn't sound like a fabulous design to me, but I can't say I know the details of it.

The existing PWR and BWR designs are already extraordinarily safe, although limited in application, since they are designed to produce only electricity.

I think there is room for other reactor types, but not because "reactors need to be safer." They're not particularly dangerous in the first place.

If we wanted to control something "dangerous," how about cars. They kill at a rate of several Vietnam wars per year.

Money spent trying to increase the safety of nuclear reactors is thus very dubious, since any investment will save very few lives, since almost no lives are in fact lost.

It would be better, I think, to invest in health care in children, for instance, since it can save many more lives per buck.

Last I looked, there hasn't be a single death from nuclear power in this country in decades, if ever, not from reactors (which are not by the way, enrichment plants) and not from enrichment plants.

I keep challenging anti-nukes to produce one such example of such a death, but mostly they curse, whine, bitch and moan and act like the fundies they are, but they never produce a record of one such death.