Abstract
Energy, abundantly produced and wisely used, has always been needed for the advancement of civilization. Until the last few centuries, productivity was severely limited because only human and animal power were available as prime movers. By the early nineteenth century, wood burning, along with wind and water power, had considerably advanced the human capability to do work. Coal and then oil and natural gas sequentially replaced wood, water, and wind as the world’s primary energy sources.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “spent” fuel often appears in the literature to depict irradiated fuel that is discharged from a nuclear reactor. We prefer to use the term “used” fuel because a very large amount of nuclear fuel (plus other valuable radioisotopes for other uses) still remains in such fuel.
- 2.
“minor” actinides refers to all actinide isotopes other than uranium and plutonium.
- 3.
Though the term “nuclear transmutation” has a broader meaning, in the context of this book we use the term “transmutation” to indicate the process of converting minor actinides found in used nuclear fuel to more stable elements that are more readily handled and disposed.
- 4.
In the absence of a program to recycle used nuclear fuel, the discarded assemblies are “waste”. With a recycling program in place, the uranium and plutonium are extracted and reused, but the remaining unseparated products are waste.
- 5.
The blanket is the region of the reactor containing fertile fuel.
- 6.
The in-core conversion ratio of a breeder reactor has often been called the internal breeding ratio, despite the fact that it is generally less than one.
- 7.
Bars above symbols are used to signify proper cross section averaging over the flux spectrum.
- 8.
It should be noted that the expressions are purposely simplified in order to elucidate the basic concept. In reality, [η – (1 + L)] can be slightly smaller than unity for the breeding condition because of the fast fission effect in 238U.
- 9.
The inverse of this term, P/M 0 is also often quoted. This ratio is called fissile specific power.
- 10.
Tails represents the depleted 238U that remains after completion of the enrichment process.
- 11.
Transuranic isotopes all have atomic numbers greater than 92 (the atomic number of uranium).
- 12.
Recycling and reprocessing are words often interchanged in the literature.
- 13.
This perspective—which in reality represents a major attribute of nuclear energy—is woefully misunderstood by a large majority of the general public.
- 14.
Minor actinides (described earlier) are essentially the same isotopes as found in TRU but without plutonium, which is considered a “major actinide” along with uranium.
- 15.
Reprocessing losses are associated with inefficiencies in the reprocessing streams. Some reprocessing losses are inevitable, since 100% separation chemistry is never fully attainable. However, achieving losses down to the 0.1–0.2% range appear quite feasible.
- 16.
The term “higher actinides” refers to actinides with progressively higher atomic numbers that are successively created by neutron capture.
- 17.
The PUREX acronym stands for Plutonium—URanium Extraction. This is the reference aqueous nuclear reprocessing method for the recovery of uranium and plutonium from used nuclear fuel.
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Tsvetkov, P., Waltar, A., Todd, D. (2012). Sustainable Development of Nuclear Energy and the Role of Fast Spectrum Reactors. In: Waltar, A., Todd, D., Tsvetkov, P. (eds) Fast Spectrum Reactors. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9572-8_1
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