Russia was the first in the world to produce a batch of reduced uranium-plutonium fuel for VVER reactors
After the successful completion of a five-year test cycle of individual parts of the recovered fuel Remix in the Saratov region at the Balakovskaya nuclear power plant, Russian engineers created the world's first fuel rods consisting only of fuel Remix.
Now scientists must create fuel rods and test the recovered fuel in an expanded volume.
Why is recovered fuel created in Russia?
New recovered fuel REMIX, designed for reactors VVER-1000, was created at the Siberian Chemical Combine (Tomsk Region, Seversk). In this case, instead of enriched uranium, REMIX fuel rods are filled with uranium-plutonium fuel pellets. Moreover, all assemblies turned out to be implemented in the form of standard structures of the type TVS-2M.
The whole point REMIX fuel consists in reusing already spent fuel and, thus, significantly increasing the existing cycle of using uranium fuel instead of canning it on special repositories.
REMIX fuel formed from reprocessed uranium and plutonium with the addition of saturated uranium. At the same time, a combination of uranium and plutonium is obtained during the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and this allows it to be used again.
Moreover, the concentration of plutonium in REMIX fuel does not exceed 5%, which is significantly lower than in the version of uranium-plutonium fuel for the so-called "high-speed" reactors, and this increases the level of safety during fuel operation.
In addition, the use of this fuel will allow in the future to significantly reduce the cost of maintaining nuclear power plants, which means that it will greatly reduce the cost of electricity generated in general.
And given that many experts predict a future shortage of uranium, reuse of fuel could literally be a “salvation” for the energy sector.
After all, the fuel Remix (regenerated mixture) may well be used at classical nuclear power plants without any modernization of existing reactors, since in the core of reactors such fuel manifests itself in the same way as classical fuel.
And, therefore, for such REMIX fuel it is quite acceptable to transfer all nuclear power plants that use reactors VVER-1000 and similar. Such revision will be not only safe, but also as effective as possible.
But up to this point, the produced batch of REMIX fuel must go through the entire cycle of pilot operation in such a reactor as VVER-1000, in which there will be six rods from a new type of fuel at once.
Then the assemblies will be tested on the scale of individual cassettes with REMIX fuel. And after that, the engineers plan to obtain a license for large-scale use. REMIX fuel.
Well, it should be admitted that in the atomic field, Russian scientists are ahead of the rest of the planet, and the creation of new fuel is another confirmation of this.
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