Kilowatt reactor

Greenewalt called Samuel Allison in Chicago on Friday afternoon. Allison passed the bad news to Walter Zitm at Argonne, the laboratory in the forest south of Chicago where CP-1 was meant to be housed and where several piles now operated. Zinn had just shut down CP-3, a shielded six-foot tank filled with 6.5 tons of heavy water in which 121 aluminum-clad uranium rods were suspended. Disbelieving, Zitm started the 300-kilowatt reactor up again and ran it at full power for twelve hours. It was primarily a research instrument and it had never been run so long at full power before. He found the xenon efiect. Laborious calculations at Hanford over the next three days confirmed it. 

Libby also estimated contamination resulting from release of 1 percent of one hundred days accumulated fission products at full power in a ten-thousand-thermal-kilowatt reactor "In an area of 1 to 5 square miles, crops would probably be unfit for use, within this same area perhaps one-half square mile would have to be temporarily evacuated, perhaps 50 to 100 acres would be unusable for about 2 years without thorough decontamination and in addition, of course, there might be a few acres near the site which would be more heavily contaminated." He reiterated that the damage would be influenced greatly by terrain and wind pat-... 

Libby translated into dollar figures the property damage for a worst possible case "explosive rupture of the core of the reactor and complete release of all the accumulated fission products after 100 days of operation at full power." For a ten-thousand-thermal-kilowatt reactor, the property damage would range from five to twenty-four million dollars for a hundred-thousand-thermal-kilowatt reactor, the estimate increased firom fifty to two hundred million dollars. ... 

It is a truism, of course, that inspection and inspectors are not popular on the part of those being inspected. Nevertheless, by objective standards, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the financial costs and other burdens of safeguards, for complying nations, are at most quite modest. If the nuclear power produced by the some 200 reactors under safeguards is valued at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, its total value would be ofthe order of 50 billion annually. Agency safeguards costs of some 100 million annually would represent about 0.2% ofthis value, virtually within the noise level. Intrusiveness is a subjective... 

A single kilogram of radioactive metallic plutonium-238 produces as much as 22 million kilowatt-hours of heat energy. Larger amounts of Pu-238 produce more heat. However, Pu-238 is not fissionable, and thus it cannot sustain a chain reaction. However, plutonium-239 is fissionable, and a 10-pound ball can reach a critical mass sufficient to sustain a fission chain reaction, resulting in an explosion, releasing the equivalent of over 20,000 tons of TNT. This 10-pound ball of Pu-239 is only about one-third the size of fissionable uranium-235 required to reach a critical mass. This makes plutonium-239 the preferred fissionable material for nuclear weapons and some nuclear reactors that produce electricity. 

The experimental data provided in the last section are a contribution to support the feesibility of developing a compact and stand-alone kilowatt-scale stable ATR reactor capable to work in a stable manner over a wide range of operating conditions. Moreover, in order to improve its performance and increase its compactness, it has been integrated with two heat exchangers for the preheating of the air and liquid water fed to the reactor by the hot exhaust stream. 

Plutonium is the most important transuranium element. Its two isotopes Pu-238 and Pu-239 have the widest applications among all plutonium isotopes. Plutonium-239 is the fuel for nuclear weapons. The detonation power of 1 kg of plutonium-239 is about 20,000 tons of chemical explosive. The critical mass for its fission is only a few pounds for a solid block depending on the shape of the mass and its proximity to neutron absorbing or reflecting substances. This critical mass is much lower for plutonium in aqueous solution. Also, it is used in nuclear power reactors to generate electricity. The energy output of 1 kg of plutonium is about 22 million kilowatt hours. Plutonium-238 has been used to generate power to run seismic and other lunar surface equipment. It also is used in radionuclide batteries for pacemakers and in various thermoelectric devices. 

There is a good economic reason for this. Look back at the Butler Volmer equation (Eq. 7.24) the larger the ifl (Le., the better the catalysis), the smaller the overpotential needed to get a given rate of reaction. However, the smaller the overpotential, the less the total cell potential, and hence the kilowatt hours, to produce a given amount of a substance in an electrochemical reactor. 

For reformate flow rates up to 400 Ndm3 min-1, the CO output was determined as < 12 ppm for simulated methanol. The reactors were operated at full load (20 kW equivalent power output) for -100 h without deactivation. In connection with the 20 kW methanol reformer, the CO output of the two final reactors was < 10 ppm for more than 2 h at a feed concentration of 1.6% carbon monoxide. Because the reformer was realized as a combination of steam reformer and catalytic burner in the plate and fin design as well, this may be regarded as an impressive demonstration of the capabilities of the integrated heat exchanger design for fuel processors in the kilowatt range. 

Russia turned up at Geneva that same year of 1955 with more than hollow promises. Alongside our full-scale 4 swimming-poor nuclear reactor which we had flown to the Conference for exhibition, the young Russian scientists presented a model of her first "commercial power reactor which, they said, had been in operation for more than a year. Not far from Moscow it had fed 5000 kilowatts of electrical energy into farms, factories and homes on a modest experimental scale. The new Soviet Five Year Plan calls for the completion by 1960 of several atomic energy plants with a total capacity equal to that of the United States and England combined. These are to be built mainly in the European part of the Soviet Union where coal and other fuel are in short supply. 

Determine the reactor volume required for one reactor and that for two equal-sized reactors in series for 80 percent conversion of A. And if the capital cost of a continuous-flow stirred-tank reactor unit is given by 200,000(17/100)° 6 (where V is reactor volume in m3), the life is 20 years with no salvage value, and power costs 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, determine which system has the economic advantage. Assume that overhead, personnel, and other operating costs, except agitation, are constant. The operating year is 340 days. Each reactor is baffled (with a baffle width to tank diameter of 1/12) and equipped with an impeller whose diameter is one-third the tank diameter. The impeller is a six-bladed turbine having a width-to-diameter ratio of 1 /5. The impeller is located at one-third the liquid depth from the bottom. The tank liquid-depth-to-diameter ratio is unity. 

The large reactors which were put into operation in September, 1944, at Hanford, Washington, were of such size as to permit the fission reaction to proceed at the rate corresponding to an output of energy amounting to 1,500,000 kilowatts. 

The capital cost of nuclear fission will have dropped significantly— especially compared with that of the then-dinosaur-technology coal-fired generation. (As one example, today the capital costs of Advanced Candu Reactors are in the range of 1000 per kilowatt [kW]—about the same as coal-fired plants.) But since the operating cost of a nuclear power plant will always be a small fraction of that for a coal-fired power plant, the energy currencies from nuclear plants will be lower. 

The electric discharge power was supplied by feeding the output of a 10,000 hertz, 30 kilowatt inductor-alternator to the primary of a 50 kilovolt transformer and, in turn, to a tuned circuit, to the reactor and to the high voltage instrumentation. The electric discharge power was determined by measuring the area of parallelogram on the oscilloscope (3). 

Figure 3.5 illustrates the spatial variation of power density in one-quarter of the core of a 1060-MWe PWR when the enrichment of and the concentration of boron control poison are uniform throughout the core. The lines plotted are lines of constant power density expressed as kilowatts of heat per liter of reactor volume, and also as kilowatts of heat per foot of fuel rod. The maximum permissible value of the latter is around 16 kW/ft, to ensure against overheating the fuel or cladding. 

Based on current performance levels, modeling suggests that a WGS reactor based on monoliths loaded with Pt/ceria catalysts will exceed DOE technical targets for reactor volume and weight. The reactor cost will be less than 3.00 per kilowatt. 

Conduct the proof-of-concept demonstration using the laboratory membrane reactor. Carry out the prototype membrane reactor demonstration for a 50 kilowatt (kW) fuel cell. 

Plutonium has assumed a position of dominant importance among the transuranium elements because of its successful use as an explosive ingredient in nuclear weapons and the place it holds as a key material in the development of industrial use of nuclear power. One kilogram is equivalent to about 22 million-kilowatt hours of heat energy. The complete detonation of a kilogram of plutonium produces an explosion equal to about 20,000 tons of chemical explosive. Its importance depends on the nuclear property of being readily fissionable with neutrons and its availability in quantity. The world s nuclear-power reactors are now producing about 20,000 kg of plutonium a year. By 1982, it was estimated that about 300,000 kg had accumulated. The various nuclear applications of plutonium are well known. Pu has been used in the Apollo lunar missions to power seismic and other equipment on the lunar surface. As with neptunium and uranium, plutonium metal can be prepared by reduction of the trifluoride with alkaline-earth metals. 

Aluminum, with its low cost, low thermal neutron absorption, and freedom from corrosion at low temperature, is ideally suited for use in research or training reactors in the low kilowatt power and low temperature operating ranges. 

The feasibility of the thermionic reactor system has been demonstrated by in-core converter and TFE tests in the United States, France, and Germany. As of the mid-1970s, four TOPAZ thermionic reactors had been built in Russia and tested at outputs of up to 10 kWe (kilowatts electrical). 

The red tape to be overcome in order to obtain permission even for the operation of a reactor of a type of which many are working is quite enormous. It takes about 8 years from decision to operation. This, in spite of the fact that only about 7% of the people living in the close neighborhood of reactors oppose these. Of the 8 years, almost 3 years are needed to convince the authorities that the reactor will not explode, that it will cause no real harm to the environment. The reactors which are functioning in our country have a potential output of 40 million electrical kilowatts. Those planned and in construction have a 5 times larger capacity. Much of the delay in getting these into operation is needed for the settlement of objections against... 

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