Enhancing the Sustainability of Nuclear Power: the Pebble Bed HTR in Deep Burn Mode

摘要

The scenario of a utility in an industrialized country starting new nuclear construction with a single PBMR reactor has been considered. To make the new construction project acceptable by government and society, a maximum effort to obtain sustainability (i.e. minimization of resource use and waste production) will have to be shown. Therefore the usual open cycle for HTR has been abandoned, and the spent fuel will be reprocessed once. The long-lived transuranic (TRU) elements Pu, Np, Am and Cm are all refabricated into so-called transmutation fuel elements, and loaded back into the same reactor, in our case a 110 MWe PBMR with low-enriched uranium cycle. In this study, the reactor physical prospects have been investigated: to what extent the amount of TRU could be reduced. In this way, 75% of the initial amount of TRU waste is being destructed, while the time span in which the waste is more radiotoxic than uranium ore is being reduced to one-third. Also, the amount of fresh driver fuel needed is decreases by 25%. A preliminary cost analysis has been performed as well. It shows that there is also a cost advantage of operating the reactor in Deep Burn mode in industrialized countries, where the waste storage fees charged per volume are relatively high.