Rethinking the light water reactor fuel cycle

The once through nuclear fuel cycle adopted by the majority of countries with operating commercial power reactors imposes a number of concerns. The radioactive waste created in the once through nuclear fuel cycle has to be isolated from the environment for thousands of years. In addition, plutonium and other actinides, after the decay of fission products, could become targets for weapon proliferators. Furthermore, only a small fraction of the energy potential in the fuel is being used. All these concerns can be addressed if a closed fuel cycle strategy is considered offering the possibility for partitioning and transmutation of long lived radioactive waste, enhanced proliferation resistance, and improved utilization of natural resources. It is generally believed that dedicated advanced reactor systems have to be designed in order to perform the task of nuclear waste transmutation effectively. The development and deployment of such innovative systems is technically and economically challenging. In this thesis, a possibility of constraining the generation of long lived radioactive waste through multi-recycling of Trans-uranic actinides (TRU) in existing Light Water Reactors (LWR has been studied. Thorium based and fertile free fuels (FFF) were analyzed as the most attractive candidates for TRU burning in LWRs. Although both fuel types can destroy TRU at comparable rates (about 1150 kg/GWe-Year in FFF and up to 900 kg/GWe-Year in Th) and achieve comparable fractional TRU burnup (close to 50a/o), the Th fuel requires significantly higher neutron moderation than practically feasible in a typical LWR lattice to achieve such performance.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Shwageraus, Evgeni

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mujid S. Kazimi and Pavel Hejzlar.

• Nuclear Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16641

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16641