After their service life is over, nuclear power plants must be decommissioned. Accordingly, Sweden has a system with segregated funds to cover the costs. Payments to the funds are dictated by the results of recurrent cost estimates. Recently, differences have been observed between different estimations for the Barsebäck BWR:s. Therefore, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, who oversees the ...

India has chalked out a nuclear power program based on its domestic resource position of uranium and thorium. The first stage started with setting up the Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) based on natural uranium and pressure tube technology. In the second phase, the fissile material base will be multiplied in Fast Breeder Reactors using the plutonium obtained from the PHWRs. Considering ...

Nuclear power reactors are, in nature nonlinear and time varying. These characteristics must be considered, if large power variations occur in their working regime. In this paper a robust optimal gain scheduling controller for regulating the power of a nuclear reactor has been designed and simulated. The proposed controller is capable of regulating power levels in a wide power range (10% to 100...

The UK nuclear power industry is predominantly based on gas-cooled, graphite moderated reactors with their being 20 operating and 6 shutdown Magnox reactors. The radioactive graphite issues associated with the Magnox reactors relate mainly to the reactor core graphite but, at two of the stations, there is also another graphite waste stream which results from the handling of their particular des...

Recent advances in high energy plasma physics show that nuclear fusion the energy source of the sun and the stars [1] may provide the corner-stone of a future sustainable energy system. Such power plants would be safe and environmentally friendly. In particular, one of the main problems of fission reactors, namely that of a possible uncontrollable nuclear reaction is banished; also the problem ...

Currently, China is pursuing a long-term expansion of its nuclear power program and plans to reprocess the resulting civilian spent fuel, recycling the plutonium in MOX fuel for LWRs and in fast breeder reactors. China presently operates three civilian nuclear power reactors, but it plans to build about 20 reactors by 2020. A pilot civilian reprocessing plant has been built at Lanzhou, with a c...

This report documents the work completed on the X-PREX facility under NEUP Project 11-3172. This project seeks to demonstrate the viability of pebble fuel handling and reactivity control for fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactors (FHRs). The research results also improve the understanding of pebble motion in helium-cooled reactors, as well as the general, fundamental understanding of lo...