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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Heiner Meldner
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 69 | Number 3 | March 1979 | Pages 438-441
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) pellet center burnup of fission reactor waste, namely, 14-MeV neutron fission of the very long-lived actinides that pose storage problems, is calculated for realistic target designs. A major advantage of pellet center burnup is safety: Only milligram quantities of highly toxic and active material need to be present in the fusion chamber, whereas blanket burnup reqUires the continued presence of tons of actinides in a small volume. One ICP plant can transmute the actinide waste of up to ten power equivalent fission reactors, i.e., large-scale development appears to provide a foreseeable-future technology that greatly reduces the necessity of high integrity waste storage (burial) time: from 107 to just over 102 yr.