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Argonne National Laboratory was assigned by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) the lead role in developing commercial nuclear energy beginning in the 1940s. . Between then and the turn of the 21st century, Argonne designed, built, and operated fourteen reactors [21] at its site southwest of Chicago, and another fourteen reactors [21] at the National Reactors Testing Station in Idaho.
In 2013, in response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered Duane Arnold "to install a reliable hardened venting capability for pre-core damage and under severe accident conditions, including those involving a breach of the reactor vessel by molten core debris" due to the similarity in reactor design.
Unlike most multi-unit nuclear power plants, each unit at Palo Verde is an independent power plant, sharing only a few minor systems. The reactor containment buildings are some of the largest in the world at about 2.6 million cubic feet (74,000 m 3) enclosed. The three containment domes over the reactors are made of 4-foot (1.2 m) thick concrete.
The NRC defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 10 miles (16 km), concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about 50 miles (80 km), concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity.
Byron Nuclear Generating Station is located near the small city of Byron, Illinois, 17 miles (27 km) from Rockford, Illinois. The two Westinghouse four-loop pressurized-water reactors each have an electrical output of over 1,000 MWe. Byron has 2 units capable of generating 2347 [14] net megawatts (MW) of electricity.
The government wanted the site to be close to dams for electricity and near the river so it had a source of liquid to cool the reactors. The rural setting meant the operation would have to ...
A fission fragment reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates electricity by decelerating an ion beam of fission byproducts instead of using nuclear reactions to generate heat. By doing so, it bypasses the Carnot cycle and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40–45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors.
Among them, Italy closed all of its nuclear stations by 1990 and nuclear power has since been discontinued because of the 1987 referendums. Kazakhstan phased out nuclear power in 1999 but is planning to reintroduce it possibly by 2035 under referendum. [4] Germany operated nuclear plants since 1960 until the completion of its phaseout policy in ...