Over 40 world leaders are gathering in Washington next week for the Global Nuclear Security Summit to tackle nonproliferation issues and, in part, to lay the groundwork for the safe expansion of civilian nuclear power around the world. GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is among the industry representatives that will be at the Nuclear Energy Institute-sponsored meeting: “The Role of the Private Sector in Securing Nuclear Materials,” which is being held on the summit’s third day. With some solutions focusing on next generation technologies, we’re taking a look today at one of the most revolutionary ones currently on the table: GE Hitachi’s design that would recycle fuel from nuclear power plants and use it to generate additional electricity.
Let me atom: Dr. Eric Loewen of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) — which is GE’s nuclear alliance with Hitachi, Ltd. — is working on the Advanced Recycling Center, or ARC, technology for nuclear fuel. GEH is the only large-scale nuclear reactor technology provider that is majority-owned by a U.S. company. “We have an historic opportunity to recycle nuclear waste before it is disposed of in the ground,” Eric says, “and to go forward and provide a leadership position in so doing.”
As Esquire magazine recently pointed out, the stakes are enormous for the breakthrough technology, as the sodium-cooled reactor that GE Hitachi’s Dr. Eric Loewen and team are developing “burns nuclear waste, emits no CO2, and might just save the world.” Eric tells GE Reports that he feels a great responsibility to further the work he inherited when he joined GE in 2006 — and to help lead a new technological revolution pioneered by GE. “We have a chance to compete in an ocean where no one else is even sailing,” he says.
The opportunity Eric sees takes the form of what’s called an Advanced Recycling Center (ARC) system, which would allow for much of the world’s used fuel from nuclear power plants to be recycled. The technology is called “PRISM,” which stands for Power Reactor, Innovative Small Module. (We’ll explain the “small module” part of PRISM in Part 2 of our series next week). Utilities also would be able to reduce the amount of used fuel that needs to be stored on-site.
Eric explains that what today is considered nuclear “waste” could potentially power all the energy needs of the United States for 70 years. With the sodium-cooled reactor technology, nuclear waste that previously would have to be stored for 1 million years would only need to be stored for 300 to 500 years to reach natural radiation levels.
So how does it work? By using a different coolant, namely sodium, (usually it’s water), neutrons born from fission are allowed higher energies in the reactor. This fact makes it possible for a sodium-cooled reactor to “burn” the remaining energy reserves in used fuel removed from a traditional water-cooled reactor. In fact, when used fuel is removed from a water-cooled reactor, 95 percent of the potential energy is still untapped. It just needs a different kind of reactor — which is where PRISM comes in. The reactor would also shut itself down automatically in the unlikely event of an accident.
Next week, we’ll provide an update on the industry conference and take a closer look at GEH’s current nuclear technologies.
* Read Esquire’s story and see their video interview with Dr. Loewen
* Read “GE’s Nuclear Waste Plan” in Forbes
* Read “Up and atom: GE’s nuclear design hits key milestone” on GE Reports
* Learn more about GEH’s current reactor technologies
* See why GE’s reactors are certified as ecomagination products
* Read “GE to build mobile nuclear threat detection system” on GE Reports