Word: reactors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ionic Motor. More elaborate ways of using nuclear fuel in rockets have been dreamed up by the imaginative engineers who plan for space travel. One of their proposals is a nuclear reactor running a conventional electrical generator. The current from it ionizes atoms of some convenient element and expels them from the tail pipe. An "ionic motor" of this sort can run, theoretically, almost forever on a cupful of uranium...
...heat can often stand atomic radiation, too. So they finally came up with a set of gadgets that ignores neutrons and gamma rays. Two of their assemblies, enclosed in a heated capsule at 842° F., spent 1,000 hours in the heart of the Oak Ridge nuclear reactor. They worked all the time, affected neither by the heat nor by the storm of radiation...
...reactor will be of novel design, using heavy water as the moderator to slow down its neutrons, and liquid sodium as the coolant to extract the heat of the reaction. This combination is extremely efficient, but engineers have always shied away from it because water and liquid sodium react explosively when they come in contact. Only recently were methods devised to keep them safely apart...
...advantage of the design is that the sodium can become very hot without vaporizing. This eliminates high-pressure vessels and piping. Another advantage is that the fuel need be only slightly enriched in costly U-235. The designers of the reactor believe that it can produce electricity at 7 mills per kilowatt-hour, which is much cheaper than the current cost (16.8 mills) of steam power in the Anchorage area...
Larger models of the heavy water-sodium reactor (50,000 kilowatts and up) can be fueled with natural uranium. This is an important advantage for sales outside the U.S. So far, the most efficient reactors have demanded enriched uranium, made only in the U.S., Britain and Russia. Many countries want nuclear power, hate becoming dependent on the great powers for fuel. If they use natural uranium they can get fuel from many independent sources...