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Carnival of Nuclear Energy 7 – ARC100

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Nuclear Green has the 7th carnival of nuclear energy.

ARC 100 and Other Small Reactors

Dan Yurman talks about the Advanced Reactor Concepts (ARC) company developing a 100 MW small modular reactor (SMR) which relies on well-understood fuel developed for a sodium-cooled fast reactor that was actually built and operated at the Argonne National Laboratory West site in Idaho.

Capacity Factor also covers the ARC100
• This is in short, a small, modular, sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor (SFR) of 50-100 MWe size
• They intend to close the fuel cycle with the original Argonne pyroprocessing system, developed for the IFR. This, as described briefly by the CEA, is a “dry” (non-aqueous) fuel reprocessing cycle, based on electrochemistry in molten salt solvents.
• To simplify fuel reprocessing, the reactor’s fuel will be metallic uranium and plutonium
• reprocessing is not integral to the power plant (as in the IFR design). Quite the opposite — ARC has a very heavy fuel loading and high burnup (80-100 GWd/ton heavy metal), allowing for an extraordinary, 20-year refuelling interval

Peter Trost argues that the economic theory of Jevons Paradox is wrong.

Jevons Paradox was first suggested by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 in a book called The Coal Question, and essentially claims that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, use of that resource increases rather than decreases. The classic case in point was that when James Watt invented his coal-fired steam engine, which was drastically more efficient than Thomas Newcomen’s earlier design, coal became a more cost effective power source, its range of applications increased, and ultimately, coal consumption boomed.

The argument is made that Jevon Paradox will not happen because we are in a long term recession and any efficiency gains will not result in more growth or usage of resources. The critics point out that China and India and other countries can grow and that the US and Europe will eventually emerge from recession.

Nextbigfuture submitted the following tothe 7th Carnival : A look at the Tri-alpha Energy Field Reversed Configuration nuclear patent from 2007

Kazatomprom increasing uranium production again. Maybe 18000/year tons in 2010 and up to 26,000 tons/year soon if there is the demand The expanded nuclear build program for Vietnam

Check out Nuclear Green for more of the 7th carnival of nuclear energy.

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