Hitachi Joins with U.S. Universities to Study TRU Fuel

Hitachi Ltd. announced last week that it has entered into a joint research project with three U.S. universities to study Transuranium Elements (TRU) as fuel in the development of Resource-renewable Boiling Water Reactors (RBWRs). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley will aid in the research of the RBWRs and make plans for the applicability of the systems at each university. According to the company, the three universities previously participated in a joint research project with Hitachi from 2007-2011 to evaluate safety and performance in the burning of TRUs.

 

The ability to burn TRUs as fuel would help reduce the time frame of “hot” used nuclear fuel, reducing the radioactivity of the waste to hundreds of years. “If TRUs could be effectively removed from these spent fuels, then the period of decay for the remaining radioactive waste materials could be reduced to just a few hundred years,” the company said in a release. “Hitachi has undertaken the development of RBWRs based on Boiling Water Reactor technologies, which already have an extensive track record of applications in commercial nuclear reactors. RBWRs could potentially use TRUs separated and refined from spent fuel as fuel along with uranium. Although RBWRs use new core fuel concepts to burn TRUs, they use the same non-core components as current Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), including safety systems and turbines. As such, RBWRs are unique in that extensive experience accumulated through the application of BWRs can be leveraged to achieve efficient nuclear fission in TRUs.”