Webinar highlights Gen IV reactors

The American Nuclear Society recently hosted a new webinar in its ongoing Educator Training series titled "Perspectives on Generation IV Reactors." It was led by Edward A. Friedman, professor emeritus of technology management at Stevens Institute of Technology and the author of Nuclear Energy: Boom, Bust, and Emerging Renaissance.

In the webinar, Friedman explored the definition of Gen IV reactors and the key attributes that meaningfully separate them from previous generations of reactors. He also took a broad look at the history of nuclear energy and the currently emerging reactor technologies in the Gen IV space.

The presentation: Starting all the way back at Henri Becquerel's accidental discovery of radiation from uranium salts in 1896 and touching on the earliest years of nuclear research, Friedman discussed the basics of fission reactions and the Manhattan Project. He then moved on to the first large-scale wave of commercial power reactor buildouts and the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, highlighting in particular the construction hiatus following the Chernobyl accident from 1986 to 2000.

He marked January 2000 as the end of this hiatus, because that is when the Department of Energy established the Gen IV International Forum, which it created to facilitate the development of safe, economical nuclear reactors. The initial members of the forum were the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, and South Africa. Five more members subsequently joined the forum: Switzerland, China, Russia, Australia, and Euratom (which contains all 27 member states of the European Union).

During the first two years of the forum, more than 100 experts evaluated approximately 130 design concepts against four overarching goals: sustainability, economics, safety, and proliferation resistance. From this evaluation, six technologies were selected, with sodium-cooled fast reactors gaining the most attention from the United States, Russia, France, and Japan.

After this first round of evaluations, the forum published guidelines on some of the key criteria defining Gen IV reactors. Perhaps most notably, the forum excluded reactors using water as a coolant from the Gen IV category, identifying several potential safety and cost benefits, including avoiding the danger of hydrogen gas and steam explosions. Gen IV reactors also must include some form of fail-safe technology that does not require human intervention-a feature many in the industry refer to as "walk-away safety." Friedman explained that, while this aspect of Gen IV reactors is not broadly understood by the public, acceptance of nuclear energy would increase if the concept of fail-safe designs was well known.

Go deeper: Friedman's full talk, which goes in-depth on the most relevant designs being developed today, is available at ans.org/webinar/view-genivperspectives/.