Re:Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
by philipkglass on Thursday July 07, 2022 @02:33PM
(#32017643)
> 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the nuclear plant to shut down.
That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime.
So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.
This is incorrect. The NuScale reactor is not an online-refueling design like the CANDU (which is indeed easily adapted for breeding high grade plutonium simply by adjusting irradation time). It is an offline-refueling design like every other operating PWR. See this NuScale presentation about refueling operations:
The reactor has to be completely shut down for more than a week during refueling (slide 13). The plant can stay online because a plant contains a minimum of 4 reactor modules:
That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime.
So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program.
This is incorrect. The NuScale reactor is not an online-refueling design like the CANDU (which is indeed easily adapted for breeding high grade plutonium simply by adjusting irradation time). It is an offline-refueling design like every other operating PWR. See this NuScale presentation about refueling operations:
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1515/ML15159A311.pdf
The reactor has to be completely shut down for more than a week during refueling (slide 13). The plant can stay online because a plant contains a minimum of 4 reactor modules:
https://www.nuscalepower.com/about-us/faq
So by staggering refueling times, the plant can continuously generate at least 75% of rated output.