Workshop on Advanced Reactors With Innovative Fuels
ARWIF 2001
|
|
Hosted by British Nuclear Fuels Limited
under the auspices of the NEA Nuclear Science Committe
22-24 October 2001 - Chester, United Kingdom
The
purpose of the workshop was to exchange information on R&D activities
and to identify areas and research tasks where international co-operation
can be strengthened. It was the second in the Advanced Reactors with Innovative
Fuels (ARWIF) Series. The first, held in October 1998, was hosted by the
Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland. The proceedings
of that first workshop are also available. A third workshop was held in 2005.
A
new generation of reactor designs are being developed that are intended
to meet the requirements of the 21st Century. In the short term,
the most important requirement is to overcome the relative non-competitiveness
of current reactor designs in the deregulated market. For this purpose,
evolutionary light water reactor (LWR) designs have been maturing and are
being promoted actively. These are specifically designed to be less expensive
to build and operate than the previous generation of LWRs, genuinely competitive
with alternative forms of generation and at the same time establish higher
levels of safety. A new generation of modular, small-to-medium (100-300
MWe/module), integral design water cooled reactors are under development.
These are designed to be competitive with nuclear and non-nuclear power
plants, to have significantly enhanced safety, to be proliferation resistant
and to reduce the amount of radioactive waste produced. A different approach
to improve competitiveness is the re-emergence of high temperature reactors
(HTR) using gas turbine technology to give higher thermal efficiencies,
low construction and operating costs, inherent safety characteristics,
and low proliferation risk.
In
the longer term, assuming that the current stagnation in the market is
successfully overcome, other requirements related to long term sustainability
will emerge. Important amongst these will be the need to minimise the environmental
burden passed on to future generations (or at least to ensure that the
cost to future generations is in balance with the benefits to the current
generation), the need to establish sustainability of fuel and the need
to minimise stocks of separated plutonium at the minimum possible working
level and to minimise accessibility to plutonium.
In
this context, topics of interest are:
-
reactors
consuming excess plutonium
-
advanced
LWRs
-
HTRs
-
fast
spectrum reactors
-
sub-critical
systems
-
minor
actinide systems
-
long-lived
fission product recycle
-
radical
innovative systems.
The
scope of the workshop comprised reactor physics, fuel performance and fuel
material technology, thermal-hydraulics, core behaviour and fuel cycle
of advanced reactors with different types of fuels or fuel lattices. Reactor
types considered were water-cooled, high temperature gas-cooled and fast
spectrum reactors as well as hybrid reactors with fast and thermal neutron
spectra. Emphasis was on innovative concepts and issues related to the
reactor and fuel.
Particular
goals of the workshop were to identify the roles which can be played by
existing experimental facilities as well as possible needs for new experimental
facilities. The conclusions of the technical sessions was synthesised and
discussed by a round table on international co-operation to facilitate
the introduction of new reactor systems.
Summary
of the Workshop
Workshop
Proceedings
Advanced
Reactors with Innovative Fuels (ARWIF-2001), Workshop Proceedings, Chester,
United Kingdom, 22-24 October 2001, OECD Paris 2002, ISBN 92-64-19847-4,
512 pages
Related
links
ARWIF
1998 recommendations (pdf, 91kb)
Related
Workshop
|
