Following a successful fission experiment using bismuth-lead fuel Russian scientists are hoping to create an entirely new kind of inherently safer nuclear reactor.
Russian scientists at the Research Institute of Nuclear Power Engineering [VNIIAM] in Moscow are hoping to develop a new reactor that will use lead and bismuth as fuel instead of uranium and plutonium. Project manager Professor Igor Ostretsov said the institute had successfully conducted a second experiment that could lead to safe and waste-free nuclear power engineering. With further work it would be possible to develop a cheap reactor that will only need to be loaded with fuel once for the entire period of its operation. “It will be necessary to decommission existing reactors and replace them with reactors based on a new technology and using a different fuel”, Ostretsov said. “A programme of intensive experiments to create and build reactors of a new generation with nuclear fuel from materials of the non-actinide group could help to solve this problem’.
VNIIAM laboratory chief Valeriy Chilan said that last November, using the U-70 accelerator at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFVE) in Protvino, scientists irradiated a lead assembly with neutrons. The lead heated up to a level that would have required 25 per cent more energy than was contained in the neutron gun, suggesting the involvement of a thermonuclear reaction in the lead.