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Clementine was the code name for the world's first fast-neutron reactor, also known as the Los Alamos fast plutonium reactor. It was an experimental-scale reactor. The maximum output was 25 kW and was fueled by plutonium and cooled by liquid mercury. Clementine was located at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The BN-350 fast-neutron reactor at Aktau, Kazakhstan.It operated between 1973 and 1994. A fast-neutron reactor (FNR) or fast-spectrum reactor or simply a fast reactor is a category of nuclear reactor in which the fission chain reaction is sustained by fast neutrons (carrying energies above 1 MeV, on average), as opposed to slow thermal neutrons used in thermal-neutron reactors.
Plutonium and the minor actinides will be responsible for the bulk of the radiotoxicity and heat generation of spent nuclear fuel in the long term (300 to 20,000 years in the future). [ 3 ] The plutonium from a power reactor tends to have a greater amount of plutonium-241 than the plutonium generated by the lower burnup operations designed to ...
When the plant was up and running, using nine nuclear reactors and five reprocessing plants, it produced about 65% of the plutonium used by the US government. The Hanford Test Reactor, which was ...
In a 2008 paper, Kessler et al. used a thermal analysis to conclude that a hypothetical nuclear explosive device was "technically unfeasible" using reactor grade plutonium from a reactor that had a burn up value of 30 GWd/t using "low technology" designs akin to Fat Man with spherical explosive lenses, or 55 GWd/t for "medium technology" designs.
Consequently, reactor operators are faced with the so-called optimal fuel reloading problem, which consists of optimizing the rearrangement of all the assemblies, the old and fresh ones, while still maximizing the reactivity of the reactor core so as to maximise fuel burn-up and minimise fuel-cycle costs.
PUREX (plutonium uranium reduction extraction) is a chemical method used to purify fuel for nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons. [7] PUREX is the de facto standard aqueous nuclear reprocessing method for the recovery of uranium and plutonium from used nuclear fuel ( spent nuclear fuel , or irradiated nuclear fuel).
The Zero Power Physics Reactor or ZPPR (originally named Zero Power Plutonium Reactor) was a split-table-type critical facility located at the Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho, USA. [1] It was designed for the study of the physics of power breeder systems and was capable of simulating fast reactor core compositions characteristic of 300-500 MWe ...