Electricity generated from nuclear power plants is generally associated with low emissions per kWh generated, an aspect that feeds into the wider debate surrounding nuclear power. This paper seeks to investigate how life-cycle emissions would be affected by including thorium in the nuclear fuel cycle, and in particular its inclusion in technologies that could prospectively operate open Th–U-bas...

The largest two sectors emitting CO2 in the world are electricity generation and land-transportation. Therefore, nuclear power plays an important role in generating electricity with low CO2 emission. An important aspect needs to be considered to ensure environmental sustainability is nuclear non-proliferation and less amount of radioactive waste generated. Thus the use of “thorium” as nuclear f...

Most HWRs currently use natural uranium fuel. Using enriched uranium fuel results in a significant improvement in fuel cycle costs and uranium utilization. On the other hand, reactivity changes of HWRs over the full range of operating conditions from cold shutdown to full power are small. This reduces the required reactivity worth of control devices and minimizes local flux distribution perturb...

The factors influencing the level of U-232 contamination in U-233 are examined for heavy-water-moderated, light-water-moderated and liquid-metal cooled fast breeder reactors fueled with natural or low-enriched uranium and containing thorium mixed with the uranium or in separate target channels. U-232 decays with a 69-year half-life through 1.9-year half-life Th-228 to Tl-208, which emits a 2.6 ...

Thorium-based fuels for nuclear reactors are being considered for use with current and future designs in both large and small-scale energy production. Thorium-232 is as abundant on Earth as lead, far more common than all isotopes of uranium, leading to its greatly reduced cost. Thorium itself offers a significantly greater neutron absorption cross-section than uranium at thermal energies, resul...

• Influence of thorium content on oxidation resistance UN was observed Thorium improve the low porosity pellets in air Uranium nitride sintered SPS can withstand interaction with water at 100°C Loss pellet integrity 200°C, regardless doping Phase separation ThO 2 and UO measured after exposure experiment is being investigated as a replacement for it shows enhanced thermal properties seems to be...

phosphoryl containing ligand tri-n-octylphosphine oxide (topo) in dichloromethane has been used as an extracting agent for tetravalent thorium and trivalent europium ions from their 1 m sodium nitrates. the equilibrium data reveal that both ions are extracted as the complexes at 1:3 metal/ligand ratio. the values of conditional extraction equilibrium constant (kex) show the superior extractive ...

The so called Innovative Options, within the field of nuclear fission systems, promise radical improvements in the fuel cycle with regard to waste disposal, non-proliferation and the possibility of severe accidents. In particular, new systems based on the use of accelerators and thorium [1,2,3] have been proposed for nuclear power production and waste incineration. In this paper we consider pot...

This paper reviews fission safety design principles and approaches for coupling inertial confinement fusion (ICF) to a subcritical fission blanket, in Laser ICF Fission Energy (LIFE) power plants. LIFE power plants use fuel derived from either spent fuel from fission reactors, or from natural uranium or thorium. By using fusion neutrons, LIFE plants can fission a large fraction of the heavy met...

CANDLE (Constant Axial shape of Neutron flux, nuclide number densities and power shape During Life of Energy producing reactor) reactors have been intensively researched in the last decades [1–6]. Research shows that this kind of reactor is highly economical, safe and efficiently saves resources, thus extending large scale fission nuclear energy utilization for thousands of years, benefitting t...