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SuperCritical Materials licenses technology for uranium seawater extraction
Last week, Austin, Texas–based nuclear fuel start-up SuperCritical Materials announced that it has secured a license from the Department of Energy for a patented uranium and critical materials adsorbent manufacturing process originally developed by a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
SuperCritical aims to use this license to extract uranium from seawater at an industrial scale in the United States and abroad.
Rei Kimura, Kazuhito Asano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1496-1502
Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2299899
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel microreactor, called MoveluXTM, was previously proposed that utilizes heat pipes as the primary heat transfer device and calcium hydride as the moderator. In this core design, the moderator temperature is the critical core operation limit because at high temperatures above 800°C, the hydrogen dissociates from the calcium hydride. The core temperature distribution, therefore, was previously evaluated. However, this evaluation did not consider gamma heating in the core and assumed that power was produced only in the fuel region. By contrast, the moderator region has a power density under realistic conditions due to gamma heating. Thus, the present work considers gamma heating in the core power distribution calculation and evaluates the impact on the moderator temperature. The power density of gamma heating was 1/10th that of the fuel region and around 1/100th that of the core thermal power. This increased the temperature of the moderator by 10 K from the case without considering gamma heating. In addition, this temperature distribution difference did not have an impact on the core criticality. In conclusion, considering the gamma heating, concerns regarding the core design are not suggested.