Session I.4.

Part I Review of Fundamentals

Module 4 Sources of Radiation

Session 7 Nuclear Reactors

IAEA Post Graduate Educational Course

4/2003 Rev 2 Radiation Protection and Safety of Radiation Sources I.4.7 – slide 1 of 48
 Overview

 In this session we will discuss Nuclear

Reactors including

 Types
 Basic Elements

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 The Beginning

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 Fossil vs Nuclear

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 Nuclear Reactors

 Types of Nuclear Reactors:

 Light Water Reactors (LWR)

 Heavy Water Reactors (HWR)
 Gas-Cooled Reactors
 Fast Neutron Reactors
 Fast Breeder Reactors

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 Boiling Water (BWR)
Nuclear Reactors

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 Pressurized Water (PWR)
Nuclear Reactors

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 Components of a Nuclear Plan

 The next five slides display the main

components of a Nuclear Power Plant:

 Control Building
 Containment Building
 Turbine Building
 Fuel Building
 Diesel Generator Building
 Auxiliary Building

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 Control Building

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 Containment Building

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 Turbine Building

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 Fuel Building

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 Diesel Generator and
Auxiliary Buildings

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 Protective Barriers

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 Steam Generator

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 Nuclear Reactors

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 Advanced Reactors

 The first advanced reactors are now

operating in Japan; others under
construction in several countries
 Nine new nuclear reactor designs either
approved or at advanced stages of planning
 Advanced reactors incorporate safety
improvements and are simpler to operate,
inspect, maintain and repair

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 Advanced Reactors

 The new generation of reactors have:

 a standardized design to expedite licensing and

reduce capital cost and construction time
 enhanced safety systems to further reduce the
possibility of core melt accidents
 higher availability and longer operating life
 higher burn-up to reduce fuel use and the
amount of waste, and
 will be economically competitive in a range of
sizes

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 Advanced Reactors

 More 'passive' safety features which rely on gravity,

natural convection, etc., to avoid accidents

 Two broad categories:

 Evolutionary - basically new models of existing,

proven designs

 Developmental - depart more significantly from

today’s plants and require more testing and
verification before large-scale deployment

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 CANDU Reactors

 CANDU stands for "Canada Deuterium Uranium“

 It is a pressurized heavy-water, natural-uranium

power reactor designed first in the late 1950s by a
consortium of Canadian government and private
industry

 All power reactors in Canada are CANDU type

 The CANDU designer is AECL (Atomic Energy of

Canada Limited), a federal crown corporation

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 CANDU Reactors

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 CANDU Reactors

 On-power refueling is one of the unique features of

the CANDU system

 Due to the low excess reactivity of a natural-uranium

fuel cycle, the core is designed to be continuously
"stoked" with new fuel, rather than completely
changed in a batch process (as in LWRs)

 This reduces core excess reactivity, and the

requirement for burnable poisons, which in turn
increases fuel burnup (decreases the fuel
throughput rate)

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 CANDU Reactors

 Other advantages of on-power refueling include:

 increased capacity factors (on-line availability)
 ability to "fine-tune" the power distribution
 ability to detect and remove defective fuel
 minimization of power perturbations

 On-power refuelling is achieved with two identical

fuelling machines that latch on to opposing ends of
a designated channel

 Each machine, operated remotely from the control

room, includes a magazine capable of either
discharging new fuel or accepting spent fuel
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 Heavy Water

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 High Temperature
Gas Cooled Reactors

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 Pebble Bed Reactor

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 Pebble Bed Reactor

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 Pebble Bed Reactor

Potential Problems (according to some groups)

 It has no containment building

 It uses flammable graphite as a moderator

 It produces more high level nuclear wastes than

current nuclear reactor designs

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 Pebble Bed Reactor

Potential Problems (according to some groups)

 It relies heavily on nearly
perfect fuel pebbles

 It relies heavily upon fuel

handling as the pebbles are
cycled through the reactor

 There's already been an accident at a pebble bed

reactor in Germany due to fuel handling problems

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 Reactors of the Future

 Future reactors - known as Generation IV

 Lead-alloy, liquid-metal cooled fast reactor
system (LFR)
 Molten salt reactor system (MSR)
 Sodium liquid-metal cooled fast reactor
 Very high temperature gas-cooled reactor
system (VHTR)
 Supercritical water-cooled reactor system

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 Where to Get More Information

 Cember, H., Johnson, T. E., Introduction to Health

Physics, 4th Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York (2008)
 Martin, A., Harbison, S. A., Beach, K., Cole, P., An
Introduction to Radiation Protection, 6th Edition,
Hodder Arnold, London (2012)
 Glasstone, S., Sesonske, A. Nuclear Reactor
Engineering, 4th Edition, Dordrecht:Kluwer
Academic Publishers (1995)
 The six Generation IV reactor designs were taken
from Nuclear News, Nov 2002
 More information at: http://www.world-
nuclear.org/info/inf08.html
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