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Reactor designs that produced material for nuclear weapons can also be harnessed to generate electricity, utilizing the waste heat they produce. During that period, the government of the United States also built an experimental prototype molten salt reactor (MSR) using U-233 fuel, the fissile material created by bombarding thorium with neutrons.
The volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100 as well. While there is a huge reduction in the volume of waste from a breeder reactor, the activity of the waste is about the same as that produced by a light-water reactor. [34] Waste from a breeder reactor has a different decay behavior because it is made up of ...
A fission nuclear power plant is generally composed of: a nuclear reactor, in which the nuclear reactions generating heat take place; a cooling system, which removes the heat from inside the reactor; a steam turbine, which transforms the heat into mechanical energy; an electric generator, which transforms the mechanical energy into electrical ...
A report by the German Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) considering 136 different historical and current reactors and SMR concepts stated: "Overall, SMRs could potentially achieve safety advantages compared to power plants with a larger power output, as they have a lower radioactive inventory per reactor and aim ...
The nuclear power debate about the deployment and use of nuclear fission reactors to generate electricity from nuclear fuel for civilian purposes peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, when it "reached an intensity unprecedented in the history of technology controversies," in some countries. [51]
The integral fast reactor (IFR), originally the advanced liquid-metal reactor (ALMR), is a design for a nuclear reactor using fast neutrons and no neutron moderator (a "fast" reactor). IFRs can breed more fuel and are distinguished by a nuclear fuel cycle that uses reprocessing via electrorefining at the reactor site.
The EBR-I produced 200 kW of electricity out of 1.4 MW of heat generated by the reactor. [8] The production of electricity at EBR-I is the first time that a reactor created in-house available electricity, and it is sometimes misreferred to as the first time that a nuclear reactor has ever created electricity, or powered a light bulb.
A fission fragment reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates electricity by decelerating an ion beam of fission byproducts instead of using nuclear reactions to generate heat. By doing so, it bypasses the Carnot cycle and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40–45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors.