Nuclea Reactor

Animated reactor system

This image (reproduced from the NRC) shows a nuclear reactor heating up water and spinning a generator to produce electricity. It captures the essence of the system well. The water coming into the condenser and then going right back out would be water from a river, lake, or ocean. It goes out the cooling towers. As you can see, this water does not go near the radioactivity, which is in the reactor vessel. 

The nuclear core

Fuel pins

The smallest unit of the reactor is the fuel pin. These are typically uranium-oxide (UO₂). They are surrounded by a zirconium clad to keep fission products from escaping into the coolant.

Fuel assembly

Fuel assemblies are bundles of fuel pins. Fuel is put in and taken out of the reactor in assemblies. The assemblies have some structural material to keep the pins close but not touching, so that there’s room for coolant. Click here to see a 3-D blowup diagram of an assembly.

Full core

This is a full core, made up of several hundred assemblies. Some assemblies are control assemblies. Various fuel assemblies around the core have different fuel in them. They vary in enrichment and age, among other parameters. The assemblies may also vary with height, with different enrichments at the top of the core from those at the bottom.

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Types of nuclear reactors

There are very many different types of nuclear reactors with different fuels, coolants, fuel cycles, purposes. Here’s an incomplete list of them. Please, add to the list by posting in the forum!

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Pressurized Water Reactor

The most common type of reactor -- the PWR uses regular old water as a coolant. The primary cooling water is kept at very high pressure so it does not boil. It goes through a heat exchanger, transferring heat to a secondary coolant loop, which then spins the turbine. These use oxide fuel pellets stacked in zirconium tubes. They could possibly burn thorium or plutonium fuel as well.
Pros:

• Strong negative void coefficient -- reactor cools down if water starts bubbling
• Secondary loop keeps radioactive stuff away from turbines, making maintenance easy.
• Very much operating experience has been accumulated and the designs and procedures have been largely optimized.

Cons:

• Pressurized coolant escapes rapidly if a pipe breaks, necessitating lots of back-up cooling systems.
• Can’t breed new fuel -- susceptible to "uranium shortage"

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Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor

The first electricity-producing nuclear reactor in the world was SFR (the EBR-1 in Arco, Idaho). As the name implies, these reactors are cooled by liquid sodium metal. Sodium is heavier than hydrogen, a fact that leads to the neutrons moving around at higher speeds (hence fast). These can use metal or oxide fuel, and burn anything you throw at them (thorium, uranium, plutonium, higher actinides).
Pros:

• Can breed its own fuel, effectively eliminating any concerns about uranium shortages (see what is a fast reactor?)
• Can burn its own waste
• Metallic fuel and excellent thermal properties of sodium allow for passively safe operation -- the reactor will shut itself down and cool decay heat without any backup-systems working (or people around), only relying on physics (gravity, natural circulation, etc.).

Cons:

• Sodium coolant is explosively reactive with air, water. Thus, leaks in the pipes results in sodium fires. These can be engineered around (by making a pool and eliminating pipes, etc.) but are a major setback for these nice reactors.
• To fully burn waste, these require reprocessing facilities which can also be used for nuclear proliferation.
• The excess neutrons used to give the reactor its resource-utilization capabilities could clandestinely be used to make plutonium for weapons.
• Positive void coefficients are inherent to most fast reactors, especially large ones. This is a safety concern.
• Not as much operating experience has been accumulated

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Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

 They are unique so far in that they use molten fuel. So there's no worry of meltdown because they’re already melted. The folks over at Energy from thorium are totally stoked about this technology.
Pros:

• Can constantly breed new fuel, eliminating concerns over energy resources
• Can be maintained online with chemical fission product removal, eliminating the need to shut down during refueling.
• No cladding means less neutron-absorbing material in the core, which leads to better neutron efficiency and thus higher fuel utilization
• Liquid fuel also means that structural dose does not limit the life of the fuel, allowing the reactor to extract very much energy out of the loaded fuel.

Cons:

• Radioactive gaseous fission products are not contained in small pins, as they are in typical reactors. So if there is a containment breach, all the fission gases can release instead of just the gases from one tiny pin. This necessitates things like triple-redundant containments, etc. and can be handled, but is certainly a challenge and disadvantage. All liquid fuel reactors have this problem.
• The presence of an online reprocessing facility with incoming pre-melted fuel is a proliferation concern. The operator could easily divert Pa-233 to provide a small stream of nearly pure weapons-grade U-233. Also, the entire uranium inventory can be separated without much effort. In his autobiography, Alvin Weinberg explains how this was done at Oak Ridge National Lab: "It was a remarkable feat! In only 4 days all of the 218 kg of uranium in the reactor were separated from the intensely radioactive fission products and its radioactivity reduced five billion-fold." Thus, anyone who operates this kind of reactor will have easy access to bomb material.
• Very little operating experience

Note: There is some great argument and discussion on the LFTR in the forum.

Boiling Water Reactor

Second most common, the BWR is similar to the PWR in many ways. However, they only have one coolant loop. The hot nuclear fuel boils water as it goes out the top of the reactor, where the steam heads over to the turbine to spin it.
Pros:

• Simpler plumbing reduces costs
• Power levels can be increased simply by speeding up the jet pumps, giving less boiled water and more moderation. Thus, load-following is simple and easy.
• Very much operating experience has been accumulated and the designs and procedures have been largely optimized.

Cons:

• With liquid and gaseous water in the system, many weird transients are possible, making safety analysis difficult
• Primary coolant is in direct contact with turbines, so if a fuel rod had a leak, radioactive material could be placed on the turbine. This complicates maintenance as the staff must be dressed for radioactive environments.
• Can’t breed new fuel -- susceptible to "uranium shortage"
• Does not typically perform well in station blackout events, as in Fukushima.

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Canada Deuterium-Uranium Reactors (CANDU)

CANDUs are a Canadian design found in Canada and around the world. They contain heavy water, where the Hydrogen in H2O has an extra neutron (making it Deuterium instead of Hydrogen). Deuterium absorbs many fewer neutrons than Hydrogen, and CANDUs can operate using only natural uranium instead of enriched.
Pros:

• Require very little uranium enrichment.
• Can be refueled while operating, keeping capacity factors high (as long as the fuel handling machines don’t break).
• Are very flexible, and can use any type of fuel.

Cons:

• Some variants have positive coolant temperature coefficients, leading to safety concerns.
• Neutron absorption in deuterium leads to tritium production, which is radioactive and often leaks in small quantities.
• Can theoretically be modified to produce weapons-grade plutonium slightly faster than conventional reactors could be.

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High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor

HTGRs use little pellets of fuel backed into either hexagonal compacts or into larger pebbles (in the prismatic and pebble-bed designs). Gas such as helium or carbon dioxide is passed through the reactor rapidly to cool it. Due to their low power density, these reactors are seen as promising for using nuclear energy outside of electricity: in transportation, in industry, and in residential regimes. They are not particularly good at just producing electricity.
Pros:

• Can operate at very high temperatures, leading to great thermal efficiency (near 50%!) and the ability to create process heat for things like oil refineries, water desalination plants, hydrogen fuel cell production, and much more.
• Each little pebble of fuel has its own containment structure, adding yet another barrier between radioactive material and the environment.

Cons:

• High temperature has a bad side too. Materials that can stay structurally sound in high temperatures and with many neutrons flying through them are hard to come by.
• If the gas stops flowing, the reactor heats up very quickly. Backup cooling systems are necessary.
• Gas is a poor coolant, necessitating large amounts of coolant for relatively small amounts of power. Therefore, these reactors must be very large to produce power at the rate of other reactors.
• Not as much operating experience

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The next stop

Those are the basics. Go on to our nuclear waste page to learn what nuclear waste is and what we can do about it. Or, if you’d rather see various types of nuclear reactors, scroll down!

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References

1. http://www.epa.gov/ttn/caaa/t3/reports/eurtc1.pdf
2. http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

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