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News in Science

New nuclear fuel may be too hot to handle

Thursday, 10 April 2008
AFP

The road towards a nuclear future may
violate existing safety standards if new high-energy uranium fuel isn't packaged
properly, tests suggest (Source: iStockphoto)

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New high-efficiency nuclear fuel meant to burn longer and
stronger may prove unstable in an emergency and hard to dispose of, experts
say.

By further enriching the uranium used to power nuclear reactors, operators
have been able to extract more electricity from a given amount of fuel, a
measure expressed in gigawatt-days per tonne of uranium (GWd/tU).

Ramping up fuel efficiency has worked especially well in the pressurised
water and boiling water reactors used in the US and elsewhere.

The objective has been to extract more power from fuel and produce less
radioactive waste, one of the most vexing problems associated with nuclear
energy.

A new generation of nuclear plants in the US and the UK is poised to use
reactors designed for burn-up rates of 60 GWd/tU, according to the magazine
New Scientist, which canvassed experts.

"At these rates, uranium fuel rods should burn for around a year longer than
today's best burn-up fuel," the magazine writes.

But tests conducted by Dr Michael Billone at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, presented last month
at a conference in Washington, raise safety concerns.

His simulations show that burn-up rates above 45 GWd/tU would violate US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's
(NRC) safety standards unless new methods are devised to package the fuel, the
magazine reports.

A sudden loss of cooling water, as happened during the partial meltdown of a
reactor core in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, would pose such a
danger, according to the simulations.

The US nuclear energy's Electric
Power Research Institute says that such a loss of coolant is not possible in
modern reactors, but the NRC has still launched a three-year review of its
safety standards.

"We are actively preparing to revise NRC's safety criteria to account for the
burn-up effect," says a commission spokesperson.

Disposal is also a potential problem because the new, high-efficiency fuel is
up to 50% more radioactive than fuel currently in use, thus generating far more
heat during storage.

Tags: nuclear-accident,
nuclear-issues,
nuclear-energy,
safety

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