Create your future with us Help us deliver better power for our changing world. UK small modular reactor: pioneering intelligent power Our world needs more low-carbon power than ever. The SMR programme. The SMR programme is one of the ways that Rolls-Royce is meeting the need to ensure the UK continues to develop innovative ways to tackle the global threat of climate change.
Proven technology. Rolls-Royce SMR is using proven nuclear technology, coupled with a unique factory-made module manufacturing and on-site assembly system, to harness decades of British engineering, design and manufacturing knowhow. A clean energy solution. Affordable Repeatable Deliverable. Downloads Small Modular Reactors Brochure.
Latest news. Press release 8 November Rolls-Royce announces funding secured for Small Modular Reactors. Rolls-Royce announces funding secured for Small Press release 8 July Rolls-Royce and Cavendish Nuclear sign delivery Fortunately, the reactor cannot explode. A nuclear explosion cannot occur because the fuel is not compact enough to allow an uncontrolled chain reaction.
The MIT reactor has a lot of water and core structural materials that slow the neutrons down before they reach other fissile atoms. Even an uncontrolled reaction would happen too slowly to cause an explosion. A thermal explosion cannot occur because our reactor is designed to want to shut down on its own as temperature increases i.
We pride ourselves on our safety culture and our safety track record. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Personnel safety is provided by the programs we have in place to perform environmental radiation monitoring, track radiation dose to staff and visitors, and ensure that the appropriate protective equipment is used by all staff performing work. The nuclear industry promotes a very strong safety culture which we embrace at our facility.
The reactor is refuelled approximately every months, but not all the fuel is replaced at once. Usually new fuel elements are installed, old elements are removed and the remaining elements are shuffled. The shape of our fuel elements allows them to be rotated degrees and flipped upside-down during refuelling in order to get the most out of each element before it is discharged.
The fuel is stored indefinitely. The United States does not currently have a final repository or reprocessing program for nuclear fuel. The technology exists, and other countries such as France and Sweden have the capability to reprocess and reuse spent fuel. There are even reactors that have been designed to run entirely on unprocessed spent fuel. Shielding is material that absorbs or blocks radiation. It is usually placed around a source of radiation to limit exposures of nearby workers and the public.
Around the reactor core itself there are several feet of shielding material including combinations of water, graphite a neutron reflector , lead a good absorber of gamma radiation , and concrete. All the concrete surrounding the core and used in the construction of the containment building is special heavy concrete containing metal slugs in addition to water, sand and cement, making it approximately five times more effective at shielding from radiation than regular concrete.
It is designed to contain radioactive material. It is sealed and the inside air is maintained a slightly lower pressure that the air outside so that if there were a leak in the containment air would leak in, rather than out. To maintain this pressure difference, there are airlocks at all of the entrances to the containment building. It takes an experienced shift operator and supervisor approximately 6 hours to perform all the necessary valving, system checks and scram checks, and another hours to withdraw the control blades to the critical bank height and raise power to the desired operating power level.
If the reactor was operated within the last 24 hours then it can be restarted in less than 2 hours. It takes less than 1 second to shut down the reactor and another hour to perform the normal shutdown valving and checks. We hire MIT undergraduate students and train them to be operators. The students who learn to be reactor operators often remark that the practical training and experience helped them build a deeper understanding of how nuclear reactors work both the mechanical aspects and the physics than they would have attained from their degree coursework alone.
We pride ourselves on our radiation protection program and our safety culture. Every activity we perform at the reactor is carefully planned to minimize the amount of radiation dose to personnel. We are constantly working to find ways to. As a result our total facility dose decreases each year. In the average annual dose was 8 mrem per staff member, well below the NCRP maximum of mrem for radiation workers.
For comparison, the annual background radiation for people living in Boston is approximately mrem not including medical procedures and air travel. The MIT reactor is similar to a power reactor in that heat and neutrons are produced by nuclear fission, the fuel is U, the coolant is water and the core is located in a large tank inside a containment dome. To learn more about different types of power reactors, click here.
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Skip to main content Try our corporate solution for free! Single Accounts Corporate Solutions Universities. Premium statistics. Read more. Median construction time required for nuclear reactors worldwide oscillated from around 84 months to months, from to respectively.
During the period in consideration, the longest median construction time for nuclear reactors was between and , at months, while the shortest was from to , at about You need a Single Account for unlimited access. Full access to 1m statistics Incl.
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