Physics of advanced reactors and fuels explored

摘要

The power reactor designs being developed for potential deployment around 2030 would, in effect, be new to the world if they were to be built and operated, but in some ways they do not seem new at all. During a special session at the Physor 2004 meeting, held April 25-30 in Chicago, after a presentation on the six designs put forward by the Generation IV international forum, an attendee commented that three of the designs (gas-cooled fast reactor, sodium-cooled fast reactor, and molten salt reactor) had already been "rejected by the world" after they had first been proposed decades ago. The speaker at the time, Hussein Khalil, of Argonne National Laboratory, conceded that some of the designs are referred to as "the usual suspects," because they have been mulled over frequently in the past but never were adopted on a wide scale. Still, he noted, these were the designs that emerged from the Generation IV roadmap activity as most likely to be deployable by 2030. In essence, the nuclear community-including reactor physicists-will have to work with them, and hope that they can be refined this time so that the world won't reject them.