Next-generation nuclear fuel may be too hot to handle: report

PARIS (AFP) – New high-efficiency nuclear fuel meant to burn longer and stronger may prove unstable in an emergency and hard to dispose of, according experts cited in a report published Wednesday.

… A new generation of nuclear plants in the United States and Britain is poised to use reactors designed for “burn-up rates” of 60 GWd/tU, according to the British weekly 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 said.

But tests conducted by Michael Billone at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, presented last month at a conference in Washington, showed that burn-up rates above 45 GWd/tU would violate US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) safety standards unless new methods were devised for packaging the fuel, the magazine reported.

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.

AFP