The U.S. nuclear industry just hit a major milestone in developing new and improved fuels for its current fleet of reactors. Framatome’s accident tolerant fuel (ATF) was recently installed for testing at the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
The US Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reported yesterday that coordination among the various entities involved in the development of accident-tolerant fuels (ATF) has “progressed to the point that all stakeholders now agree on the feasibility of a 2023 timeline”.
Following a planned outage, Unit 1 at the Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant near Baxley in southeastern Georgia returned to service in early March outfitted with first-of-their-kind accident tolerant fuel (ATF) test assemblies. The development marks a major milestone for the advanced fuel technology, which, beyond safety benefits, could furnish the world’s light water reactor fleet with much-needed cost efficiencies to help them stay competitive.
AREVA NP is working in many areas of fuel development. Our priority is to improve the economics of today’s fuel. We introduced two new fuel types: GAIA for 17×17 fuel and ATRIUM 11 for boiling water reactors. ATRIUM 11 has an 11×11 array which distributes power better than the 10×10 array of fuel rods.
The AREVA plant in Richland will begin manufacturing newly developed advanced nuclear fuel assemblies that allow operators more time to respond in emergencies. The plant will start manufacturing the fuel later this year, to be loaded into one of the units at Georgia’s Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in the spring of 2019. AREVA developed the…