The cancellation of the advanced thermal reactor is " very telling of the whole plutonium program's future, " said Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Green Action, an anti-nuclear group.
32.
All plutonium isotopes are either fissile or fertile, although plutonium-242 needs to absorb 3 neutrons before becoming fissile curium-245; in thermal reactors isotopic degradation limits the plutonium recycle potential.
33.
But unlike the breeder, the advanced thermal reactor would not be able to generate more fuel than it consumes, and it was considered to be technically easier to build.
34.
All reactors breed some fuel this way, but today's solid fueled thermal reactors don't breed enough new fuel from the fertile to make up for the amount of fissile they consume.
35.
Dai's team built the first neutron crystal spectrometer, the first neutron diffractometer, the first zero-energy thermal reactor, the first neutron transmutation doping of monocrystalline silicon, first large-sized electromagnetic separator in China.
36.
The plutonium can be used in the manufacture of mixed oxide fuel ( MOX ) for thermal reactors, or as fuel for fast breeder reactors, such as the Prototype Fast Reactor at Dounreay.
37.
"Nautilus " was powered by the Submarine Thermal Reactor ( STR ), later redesignated the S2W reactor, a pressurized water reactor produced for the US Navy by National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho.
38.
Reprocessing the plutonium from the used fuel back into thermal reactors in the form of mixed oxide ( MOX ) can increase the energy extracted from the original fuel by about 20 %.
39.
The Fugen thermal reactor in Tsuruga, 200 miles west of Tokyo, has been storing spent fuel on-site since a fire and explosion closed another fuel reprocessing plant north of the capital in 1997.
40.
This fraction includes the actinides most easily reusable as nuclear fuel in a thermal reactor, and the two long-lived fission products best suited to disposal by transmutation, Tc-99 and I-129, as well as Se-79.
