The core design of a Small Modular Pressurised Water Reactor for commercial marine propulsion

Abstract

If international agreements regarding the need to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions are to be met then there is a high probability that the shipping industry will have to dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. For emission reductions from ships greater than around 40% then alternatives to fossil fuels -such as nuclear energy -will very likely be required. A Small Modular Pressurised Water Reactor design has been developed specifically to meet the requirements of a large container ship with a power requirement of 110 MWe. Container ships have a number of requirements -including a small crew size and reduced outages associated with refuelling -that result in a greater focus on design simplifications, including the elimination of the chemical reactivity control system during power operation and a long core life.We have developed a novel, soluble-boron free, low power density core that does not require refuelling for 15 years. The neutronic and fuel performance behaviour of this system has been studied with conventional UO 2 fuel. The size of the pressure vessel has been limited to 3.5 metres in diameter. Furthermore, to ensure the survivability of the cladding material, the coolant outlet temperature has been reduced to 285 • C from 320 • C as in conventional GWe-class PWRs, with a resulting reduction in thermal efficiency to 25%. The UO 2 core design was able to satisfactorily meet the majority of requirements placed upon the system assuming that fuel rod burnups can be limited to 100 GWd/tHM. The core developed here represents the first workable design of a commercial marine reactor using conventional fuel, which makes realistic the idea of using nuclear reactors for shipping.

Nuclear Fuels and Reprocessing Technologies: A U.S. Perspective

“…Spent nuclear fuel contains many other long-lived radioisotopes, but these are less mobile in the natural environment than krypton, xenon, and iodine. Notable long-lived fission product radioisotopes include 79 Se (3.5E5y), 90 Sr (28.9y), 93 Zr (1.5E6y), 99 Tc (2.13E5y), 107 Pd (6.5E6y), 135 Cs (2.3E6y), and 137 Cs (30.2y). 131 I (8d) is of concern in, for example, fallout from a nuclear weapon detonation or a reactor core failure, but its half-life is too short to be of concern in typical spent nuclear fuel.…”

The economic impacts of restricting black carbon emissions on cargo shipping in the Polar Code Area

“…Besides all alternative energies mentioned in detail above, nuclear power is also another substitution to fossil fuels. Recent research has developed a small modular Pressurised Water Reactor specially to meet the requirements of large container ships (Peakman et al, 2019). However, while nuclear-powered ships have been operating successfully at sea for decades, most of them belong to the naval systems and the rest are largely derived from naval vessels as well, such as icebreakers (Spyrou, 2006;Bukharin, 2006;Peakman et al, 2019).…”

The Potential of Pressurised Water Reactors to Provide Flexible Response in Future Electricity Grids

“…SM-PWRs that operate without soluble boron present in the primary coolant during operation (for example, the SMR-160 [34], CAREM [35] and SMART [36] systems) can benefit from the following operational advantages [37]:…”

“…There is also the potential to use alternative burnable poisons to the conventional Gd 2 O 3 used in most LWR fuel today to compensate for the lack of soluble boron reactivity control and reduce the reliance on control rods [38]. Er 2 O 3 is one alternative burnable poison that has been considered for cores without soluble boron and that has already been employed in commercial PWRs [37]. However, experience is limited to relatively low concentrations of Er 2 O 3 (around 2 wt.%) and there will be an associated economic cost due to the residual poison penalty.…”