Sodium-cooled fast-neutron-spectrum liquid-metal reactors (LMRs) received much attention during the 1960s and ’70s when it appeared that their breeding capabilities would soon be needed to supply fissile material to a rapidly expanding nuclear industry. When it became clear in the 1980s that this was not a realistic expectation, enthusiasm waned. The developmental work of the previous decades, however, resulted in the construction of a number of LMRs around the world—in the United States, Russia, France, Britain, Japan, and Germany. Most LMRs are fueled with uranium dioxide or mixed uranium-plutonium dioxides. In the United States, however, the greatest success has been with metal fuels.

While some LMRs are of the loop type, equipped with heat exchangers and pumps outside the primary reactor vessel, others are of the pool variety, featuring a large volume of primary sodium in a pool that also contains the primary pumps and the primary-to-secondary heat exchanger. In all types the heat extracted from the core by primary sodium is transferred to a secondary, nonradioactive sodium loop, which serves as the heat source for a steam generator that heats the water in a tertiary loop to power a turbine. The pool type seems to have some safety advantage in that the large volume of primary sodium heats up only slowly even if no power is extracted; thus, the reactor is effectively isolated from upsets in the balance of the plant. The reactor core in all such systems is a tightly packed bundle of fuel in steel cladding through which the sodium coolant flows to extract the heat. Most LMRs are breeders or are capable of breeding, which is to say that they all produce more fissile material than they consume.

CANDU reactors

Canada has focused its developmental efforts on reactors that utilize abundant domestic natural uranium as fuel without having to resort to enrichment services that would be supplied only by other countries. The result of this policy is the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor—a line of natural uranium-fueled reactors moderated and cooled by heavy water. A reactor of this kind consists of a tank, or calandria vessel, containing a cold heavy water moderator at atmospheric pressure. The calandria is pierced by pressure tubes made of zirconium alloy in which the natural uranium fuel is placed and through which heavy water coolant is circulated. In contrast to the more common LWR reactor vessel, which is aligned in a vertical configuration, a CANDU reactor vessel is aligned horizontally. Electric-power generation is obtained through the transfer of the heat of fission into the heavy-water coolant, which is circulated to a steam generator. The light-water steam exiting the steam generator in the secondary loop is then transported through a conventional turbine cycle.

The fuel assembly of a CANDU reactor, which consists of a bundle of short zirconium alloy-clad tubes containing natural uranium dioxide pellets, can be changed while the system is running. A new assembly is simply pushed into one end of a pressure tube, and the spent fuel that it replaces is collected as it is extruded at the opposite end. This feature has given the CANDU higher capacity factors than other reactor types. Capacity factor refers to the ratio of time that a reactor is operating at full power during a given period versus the total available time during that same period. Thus, a capacity factor of 1.0 refers to a reactor that operates at full power 24 hours a day over the entire period of time being considered. Several countries have purchased CANDU reactors for the same reason that they were developed by Canada—to be independent of foreign enrichment services.

Advanced gas-cooled reactor

The advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) was developed in the United Kingdom as the successor to reactors of the Calder Hall class, which combined plutonium production and power generation. Calder Hall, the first nuclear station to feed an appreciable amount of power into a civilian network opened in 1956. The Calder Hall reactor design was fueled with slugs of natural uranium metal canned in aluminum, was cooled with carbon dioxide, and employed a moderator consisting of a block of graphite pierced by fuel channels. In the AGR, fuel pins clad in Zircaloy (a trademark for alloys of zirconium having low percentages of chromium, nickel, iron, and tin) and loaded with approximately 2 percent enriched uranium dioxide are placed into zirconium-alloy channels that pierce a graphite moderator block. This design utilizes fast neutron energies and is therefore referred to as a fast reactor. The enriched fuel permits operation to economic levels of fuel burnup. A coolant of carbon dioxide absorbs and transports heat to a steam generator, where the heat is conducted to the secondary loop and ultimately to a traditional steam-turbine cycle.

Although a number of AGRs have been built in the United Kingdom, maintenance and malfunction issues have proved to be more costly than expected, and no new AGRs are projected for construction.

Other power reactor types

A large variety of reactor types have been built and operated on an experimental basis. A few examples include organic liquid-cooled and liquid-moderated reactors that can operate like a pressurized-water reactor but without requiring pressures in the primary circuit to be as high as those in the traditional PWR; sodium-cooled graphite-moderated reactors; and heavy-water reactors built in a pressure-vessel design. Each design has its own advantages and disadvantages.