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In a fission nuclear reactor, uranium-238 can be used to generate plutonium-239, which itself can be used in a nuclear weapon or as a nuclear-reactor fuel supply. In a typical nuclear reactor, up to one-third of the generated power comes from the fission of 239 Pu, which is not supplied as a fuel to the reactor, but rather, produced from 238 U. [5] A certain amount of production of 239
A breeder reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates more fissile material than it consumes. [1] These reactors can be fueled with more-commonly available isotopes of uranium and thorium, such as uranium-238 and thorium-232, as opposed to the rare uranium-235 which is used in conventional reactors.
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.
Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, operating eight CANDU reactors. Natural uranium is a mix of isotopes: approximately 99.28% uranium-238 and 0.72% uranium-235 by atom fraction. Nuclear power reactors are usually operated at constant power for long periods of time, which requires a constant rate of fission over time.
RBMK reactor fuel was used in Soviet-designed and built RBMK-type reactors. This is a low-enriched uranium oxide fuel. The fuel elements in an RBMK are 3 m long each, and two of these sit back-to-back on each fuel channel, pressure tube. Reprocessed uranium from Russian VVER reactor spent fuel is used to fabricate RBMK fuel.
In a nuclear reactor, non-fissile isotopes capture a neutron breeding fissile isotopes. 234 U is converted to 235 U more easily and therefore at a greater rate than uranium-238 is to plutonium-239 (via neptunium-239), because 238 U has a much smaller neutron-capture cross section of just 2.7 barns.
If natural uranium is enriched to 3% U-235, it can be used as fuel for light water nuclear reactors. If it is enriched to 90% uranium-235, it can be used for nuclear weapons. Diagram of the principles of a Zippe-type gas centrifuge with U-238 represented in dark blue and U-235 represented in light blue.
Red: uranium-238, light green: plutonium-239, black: fission products. Intensity of blue color between the tiles indicates neutron density. A traveling-wave reactor (TWR) is a proposed type of nuclear fission reactor that can convert fertile material into usable fuel through nuclear transmutation, in tandem