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India has approved the construction of ten indigenously designed pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR). India approved the construction of ten 700 MWe units in a “significant decision to fast-track India’s domestic nuclear power program”.
The Cabinet’s announcement did not give any timeline or locations for the new plants, but said the project would result in a “significant augmentation” of the country’s nuclear generation capacity.
India has 6780 MWe of installed nuclear capacity from 22 operational reactors with another 6700 MWe expected to come on stream over the next five years, the cabinet noted. It said the ten new units would be a “fully homegrown initiative”, with likely manufacturing orders to Indian industry of about INR 700 billion ($11 billion).
China is to supply Argentina with two nuclear power reactors – one a Candu pressurised heavy water reactor (PHWR), the other a Hualong One pressurised water reactor (PWR). The contract was among 19 agreements signed yesterday in Beijing during a meeting of Chinese president Xi Jinping and Argentinean president Mauricio Macri.
Source: NextBigFuture.com
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Saturday May 20 2017, @10:44AM (3 children)
[...] thorium plant that would CONSUME nuclear waste rather than produce more.
Thorium doesn't magically fission without fission products. India has a lot of thorium, and is working on a reactor that will use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_heavy-water_reactor [wikipedia.org]
The plan includes
Three stream reprocessing of fuel containing Pu, Th and U.
-- https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/aris/2013/AHWR.pdf [iaea.org]
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Saturday May 20 2017, @05:58PM (2 children)
The fission products are not a big problem. The transactinides (which are not fission products) sort of are. Those are what thorium reactors are designed to greatly reduce.
Unfortunately, I'm not confident that India's approach to thorium is practical. LFTRs are not ready to build production plants either; they need more research.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 20 2017, @11:06PM (1 child)
I don't think transactinides are a problem, because they are formed in small amounts and have short half-lives:
Transactinides are radioactive and have only been obtained synthetically in laboratories. None of these elements has ever been collected in a macroscopic sample.
[...]
Due to their short half-lives (for example, the most stable isotope of rutherfordium has a half-life of 11 minutes, and half-lives decrease gradually going to the right of the group) and the low yield of the nuclear reactions that produce them, new methods have had to be created to determine their gas-phase and solution chemistry based on very small samples of a few atoms each.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactinide_element [wikipedia.org]
By "fission products" I meant elements such as iodine, caesium, strontium, technetium and xenon. If released to the environment, they can be a problem because they're radioactive and because some can bioaccumulate. If left in a reactor, some can be a problem because they absorb neutrons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_poison [wikipedia.org]
As a fertile material thorium is similar to 238
U, the major part of natural and depleted uranium.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Nuclear_fuel [wikipedia.org]
I'm guessing what you meant instead of transactinides was transuranic elements. According to the page I linked just above, the transuranic elements associated with a thorium fuel cycle have shorter half-lives than those from a uranium fuel cycle. However, that glosses over the fact that the uranium-233 produced has a half-life of ~159,000 years; and the uranium-232, ~69 years (pedantically, uranium is not transuranic).
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Sunday May 21 2017, @05:26AM
You're right.