Platts NuclearFuel: Thorium Power Plans VVER Tests, Eyes U.S. Market
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thoriumpower.com
Lead test assemblies of thorium fuel
are planned to be loaded into one of
the VVER-1000 reactors at Kalinin near
Moscow in 2010 as part of a multi-year
demonstration program, Ernie
Kennedy, a member of US company
Thorium Power Ltd.’s technical advisory
board, told a London conference
October 31.
He said the idea is to demonstrate
the new fuel, which consists of a central
“seed” assembly surrounded by a
thorium blanket, in a VVER and “then
expand to other PWRs and then perhaps
BWRs,” for which the thorium
fuel design is more difficult.
However, Thorium Power’s director
of corporate affairs and investor relations,
Peter Charles, said in a separate
interview that reorganization of Russia’s
nuclear sector had slowed finalization of
contracts for the VVER test irradiation
under an April 2007 agreement with
Red Star, a Rosatom design bureau. He added that Thorium
Power was shifting its emphasis from plutonium disposition
— the origin of the Russian partnership — toward commercial
deployment of thorium-based fuel in the US.
Addressing an IBC fuel cycle conference in London,
Kennedy said the Kalinin demonstration would require an
amendment to the reactor’s licensing permit, which Charles
said has been sought. Elektrostal will manufacture the
Kalinin test assemblies, Kennedy said. The VVER-1000’s configuration makes it “relatively easy” to design the thorium
assemblies without having to change reactor internals or
refueling machine, he said.
Kennedy said that while it’s feasible to use thorium fuel
in PWRs designed by Westinghouse or Areva, “that development
is not as well along” as in VVERs. As for BWRs, “it is
very difficult to do a seed-and-blanket assembly in a BWR,”
so there has been “not much work in that area.”
Development work and testing in Russia, he said, is less
expensive than in the West, “and the work’s been excellent
from what I’ve seen.” Part-length fuel rods representative of
the Thorium Power fuel design have accumulated about four
years’ irradiation in the IR-8 test reactor at the Kurchatov
Institute in Moscow, an irradiation planned to continue for
several more years, he said. There has also been some extensive
thermal-hydraulic testing, he said, both on single rods
and meter-long mockups of full seed-and-blanket assemblies.
At a public scoping meeting associated with DOE’s
Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program in March,
Thorium Power CEO Seth Grae described those tests and
said one of the meter-long assemblies was meant to simulate
conditions in a Western PWR design (NF, 26 March, 5).
Proliferation-resistant
Thorium Power — based in McLean, Virginia — focuses
on the development, design and testing of thorium-based
fuel for existing and future commercial reactors. The fuel is
designed to be proliferation-resistant and to reduce the volume
of spent fuel, according to company documentation
(http://www.thoriumpower.com). The company has been
developing the seed-and-blanket fuel assembly technology
since its founding in 1992.
The Thorium Power fuel is specifically designed not to be
recycled or reprocessed, Kennedy said. A number of developing
countries now wanting to build nuclear reactors for the
first time had told Thorium Power they “do not want to be
perceived either domestically or internationally as developing
a weapons program,” he said. “If there is a proliferationresistant
fuel cycle available, it ranks high on their list of
desires,” he said.
Charles said spent thorium seed-and-blanket fuel would be
“very difficult” to reprocess because of gamma radiation, and
“wouldn’t be worth it” because the seed assemblies would contain
very little fissile material and a lot of minor actinides. In
the seed-and-blanket assembly, a central metallic “seed” consisting
of either uranium-zirconium or plutonium-zirconium
fuel rods is surrounded by a thorium-uranium dioxide blanket.
Kennedy said the thorium in the blanket reduces the
proliferation risk of fissile materials in the spent fuel
because, under irradiation, the thorium is converted to fissile
U-233, which is burned in-situ over the life of the fuel
assembly. Also, the thorium fuel cycle leads to the production
of only small amounts of plutonium and the isotopic
content of that plutonium makes it more unsuitable for
weapons than normal reactor-grade plutonium.
For countries that want to consume excess plutonium,
plutonium in the seed of the thorium fuel assembly can be
burned “about three times faster and at somewhere between a third and half the cost of the mixed-oxide process,” he
said, referring to more conventional uranium-plutonium
oxide fuel now used in LWRs.
Three seed designs
Thorium Power’s current development work in Russia is
looking at three different assembly designs for the VVER 1000-
type reactor, he said. All three have a thorium blanket, but the
seed fuel is either uranium-zirconium, reactor-grade plutonium
and zirconium, or weapons-grade plutonium and zirconium.
The seed fuel is designed for three operating cycles, he said, or
three years assuming annual cycles. “The blanket stays in residence
for nine years, or nine cycles,” he said.
The nine cycles enable efficient U-233 in-situ burning —
“a primary contribution to the overall reduction in waste in
the blanket assemblies,” he said. Kennedy said the Kalinin
VVER-1000 demonstration is expected to last a minimum of
three years. “We would like to take it all the way to seven
years to show the full life of the blanket,” he said.
Charles said by telephone November 15 that the development
work with Kurchatov Institute had been funded partially
by US government grants of between $4 million and
$8 million over the past decade or so, as part of the
weapons-plutonium disposition program under which the
US and Russia were to denature 34 metric tons each of
excess weapons Pu. He added that private investors had “at
the very least matched those figures” over that period, contributing
between $5 million and $10 million to the effort.
But now that the Russian Pu disposition program has
shifted its emphasis away from MOX in VVERs and towards
Pu fuel in fast reactors, Thorium Power, too, is shifting away
from Pu-based fuel, he said. “The MOX people are not our
competitors,” he told Platts. “If people realize there is a need
for disposition of plutonium, we’ll be there,” but “our main
focus [now] is pretty much commercialization.”
According to a recent report in EnergyWashington Week,
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch “is drafting legislation to ease
concerns about nuclear waste by requiring DOE to develop
standards for nuclear reactors to use thorium fuel rather
than uranium.” A measure known as the “Thorium Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007” is expected to be
offered for consideration during upcoming negotiations on a
final energy bill, the report said.
Hatch is believed to seeking an appropriation of some
$250 million over the next five years to get DOE and NRC
started on thorium fuel development and licensing, said
Charles. He said Thorium Power had “been in touch with
the senator.”
Charles said that although thorium seed-and-blanket fuel
for Western PWRs would still need to be tested, “a certain
amount of data could be used” from the Russian tests to
save time. “We feel comfortable that the transition to
AP1000 [fuel] will be done with very few technical hurdles,”
he said.
Thorium Power, founded by Alvin Radkowsky, who
worked with Admiral Hyman Rickover on early PWR fuel
development, went public on October 6, 2006 via a takeover by Novastar Resources, a commercial thorium mining venture.
The company was renamed at the takeover.
—Pearl Marshall, London; Ann MacLachlan, Paris |
