вЂњThe Chinese market is large enough to make that potentially possible. вЂњThere have been studies that indicate that if reactors are mass-produced, they can drive down costs,вЂќ says Charles Forsberg, executive director of the MIT Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project. But ChinaвЂ™s sheer size could help overcome that barrier. One of the main hurdles to building these reactors is the cost of the fuel and of the reactor components. IranвЂ™s aggressive nuclear energy program seems to be constantly in the news these days while other regional countries, including Jordan, have nuclear power ambitions of their own. ChinaвЂ™s eventual goal is to eliminate or greatly reduce waste by recycling the spent fuel. And while pebble-bed reactors do not totally solve the problem of nuclear waste, the fuelвЂ™s form also gives rise to multiple options for waste disposal.

The graphite coating protects the fuel from breaking down, even at temperatures well beyond those found in the reactor core during operation, and once the interior temperature passes a certain threshold, the nuclear reactions slow, cooling the reactor and making it essentially self-regulating. Such high-temperature reactors are immune to meltdown because they donвЂ™t require elaborate external cooling systems of the sort that failed at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. Beyond that, China plans to sell these reactors internationally in January, Chinese president Xi Jinping signed an agreement with King Salman bin Abdulaziz to construct a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor in Saudi Arabia.Дuring a recent visit to the Tsinghua facility, technologists were testing the huge helium blower that will circulate the gas coolant at the Shandong site once it starts up. If itвЂ™s successful, Shandong plant would generate a total of 210 megawatts and will be followed by a 600-megawatt facility in Jiangxi province. The twin 105-megawatt reactors-so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown-would be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world.Д¬onstruction of the plant is nearly complete, and the next 18 months will be spent installing the reactor components, running tests, and loading the fuel before the reactors go critical in November 2017, said Zhang Zuoyi, director of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, a division of Tsinghua University that has developed the technology over the last decade and a half, in an interview at the instituteвЂ™s campus 30 miles south of Beijing. In what would be a milestone for advanced nuclear power, ChinaвЂ™s Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation plans to start up a high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant next year in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The United Kingdoms decision to build its first new nuclear power plant since the 2011 Fukushima meltdown in Japan has reignited a debate in Germany over the countrys decision to close all of.

Nuclear reactor meltdown proxmity