12 d
https://www.insidesources.com/nuclear-engine-to-change-nuclear-future-simplify-waste-issue/
What will they think of next.
The rotary engine that Adams envisions looks diagrammatically very like a schematic
of the rotatory engine that Mazda introduced to varying degrees of success in its
cars in the 1970s.
It works like this: A small amount of gasified “nanofuel,” which contains nuclear
material mixed with hydrogen, is ignited by a neutron source to set up a controlled
fission reaction, creating heat and propelling the rotor forward and driving the
crank shaft. The fuel can be derived from the transuranic parts of spent conventional
nuclear fuel or can be created separately.
A company dedicated to energy innovation, Global Energy Research Associates (GERA),
is working on design and raising money. The Department of Energy has held back.
Adams, 45, explains his engine this way, “Much like the way your car converts
chemical energy into mechanical work, our engine converts nuclear energy directly and
safely into useful mechanical work. This eliminates a lot of expensive reactor
equipment and paves the way for low-cost nuclear power plants.”
He says his engine would produce 340 megawatts of electric power, if deployed in a
combined-cycle configuration. The radioactive byproducts are only cesium and
strontium with half-lives of about 30 years — a great improvement on the nuclear
waste from conventional reactors. It would be a high-level waste burner as well as an
energy source. Tests to prototype engine components are underway at the Idaho
National Laboratory in Idaho Falls.
Idaho National Laboratory
1955 N. Fremont Ave.
Idaho Falls, ID 83415
Chris Cosman
Processing of Used Nuclear Fuel
A key, nearly unique, characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel may be
reprocessed to recover fissile and fertile materials in order to provide fresh fuel
for existing and future nuclear power plants. Several European countries, Russia,
China and Japan have policies to reprocess used nuclear fuel, although government
policies in many other countries have not yet come round to seeing used fuel as a
resource rather than a waste.
Used nuclear fuel has long been reprocessed to extract fissile materials for
recycling and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes.
Recycling today is largely based on the conversion of fertile U-238 to fissile plutonium.
New reprocessing technologies are being developed to be deployed in conjunction with
fast neutron reactors which will burn all long-lived actinides, including all uranium
and plutonium, without separating them from one another. A significant amount of
plutonium recovered from used fuel is currently recycled into MOX fuel; a small
amount of recovered uranium is recycled so far.
Google
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