User:Athvale/sandbox/Advanced Nuclear

Advanced Nuclear

Advanced nuclear encompasses a wide range of new designs and advancements in the types of combined technologies and methodologies used to enable improvements in the creation of heat through a nuclear reaction to produce energy, in contrast to the first and second generations of nuclear reactor designs (Gen I and Gen II). The earliest Gen I and Gen II nuclear reactors built utilized the light-water reactor design in one of three variants: the pressurized water reactor (PWR), the boiling water reactor (BWR), and the supercritical water reactor (SCWR). The decision to standardize around the use of light-water (i.e. not heavy water, as both its coolant and neutron moderator) was a trade-off that brought both advantages and disadvantages to the initial development and commercialization of nuclear power for terrestrial energy. Some of the different reactor design ideas being explored and developed for Generation III reactors and Generation IV reactors (Gen IV) today were actually first conceived within the National Labs back in the 1950s and 1960s. Several of these concepts even had the benefit of being prototyped and tested over a period of time. Nevertheless, none of them made it to the point of commercialization. Many of the earliest designs got closeted once the decision was made to go ahead with the light-water reactor. These ideas for other ways to generate nuclear power languished until relatively recently, when a range of motivating factors, most importantly climate change, inspired a new crop of nuclear Ph.Ds and engineers to seek ways to improve the safety, production and performance characteristics of traditional nuclear power. While the light-water reactor has been highly successful and the technology has been deployed in hundreds of reactors around the world, most all of which have operated at high efficiency levels decade after decade, there have been fairly strong concerns raised with the public about the safety nuclear power as a result of just a few notable accidents. The first generation implementation has not been without obvious draw-backs, including the need to mine and refine uranium and the fact that the reactor burns only about 5% of the actinate material in the fuel pellet, resulting in a considerable amount of radioactive waste material. Now there is a race to find and commercialize cheaper, safer, easier and more efficient nuclear reactors that can operate using more readily available minerals like thorium and even nuclear waste activates. Russia, India and China have been investing heavily in efforts to develop advanced nuclear reactors. In the U.S., where strict regulations prevent the NRC from even being able to review Gen IV reactor applications, entrepreneurs have already begun applying advanced nuclear structural ideas to the traditional light-water fission process, resulting in what might be consider Generation III proposals. The Generation IV International Forum, founded in 2001, is "a co-operative international endeavor which was set up to carry out the research and development needed to establish the feasibility and performance capabilities of the next generation nuclear energy systems." There are currently ten active members: Canada, China, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), France, Japan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States. The non-active members are Argentina, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. Generation V reactors refer to reactors that are still purely theoretical and are therefore not yet considered feasible in the short term, resulting in limited R&D funding.

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