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Nuclear fuel cycle reimagined: Powering the next frontiers from nuclear waste
In the fall of 2023, a small Zeno Power team accomplished a major feat: they demonstrated the first strontium-90 heat source in decades—and the first-ever by a commercial company.
Zeno Power worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to fabricate and validate this Z1 heat source design at the lab’s Radiochemical Processing Laboratory. The Z1 demonstration heralded renewed interest in developing radioisotope power system (RPS) technology. In early 2025, the heat source was disassembled, and the Sr-90 was returned to the U.S. Department of Energy for continued use.
Yafen Liu, Rui Yan, Yang Zou, Xuzhong Kang, Ruimin Ji, Bo Zhou, Shihe Yu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 203-212
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1474703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Zero-power experiments are very important parts in design verification for all reactor types. In the 1970s, in China, at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (then, Shanghai Institute of Nuclear Research), a Critical Experiment Device (cold) was established for research on the physics characteristics of the molten salt reactor (MSR), and a series of zero-power experiments was successfully performed; related experimental results were obtained later. The device consisted mainly of graphite moderator and powdered BeF2 – UF4 / ThF4 fuel and could achieve a maximum power of 200 W. The current work is focused on criticality properties with various core configurations and fuel arrangements of this device and the worths of the cadmium rods used in the device. Evaluations on the agreement of calculation results with experimental data showed good results. Discrepancies between the calculation results and the experimental data might be primarily caused by the simulated outermost fuel element positions not being exactly the same as the experimental arrangements and the unmodeled instruments used in the experiments. The findings in this work can be considered a step of verification of simulation methods and calculations for a cold MSR.