Advanced Manufacturing and Materials to Enable Advanced Nuclear Energy~1

摘要

The so-called advanced nuclear energy, previously referred to as Gen Ⅳ, consists of fission reactors that instead of water, use gas, salt, or liquid metal coolants . These systems may utilize fast or thermal neutrons in their designs and aim to offer better thermal efficiency, improved resource utilization, enhanced safety, and reduced levelized cost of electricity. Most of these "advanced" designs were conceptualized decades ago in the First Nuclear Era and some were actually demonstrated. With significant improvements in reactor analysis tools and computational power, today's advanced reactor studies aim to optimize their design. However, these "advanced" designs end up closely resembling their predecessors. There exist two possibilities to explain this outcome. The first is that the materials, fuels, and designs that emerged and were utilized in fission systems of the 1950s-1970s represent the best possible options and with those global optima already identified, there is no room for improvement. The second explanation is that since the nuclear industry and research community has failed to develop and adopt new materials and methods of manufacturing, the system designs have been constrained over this period.