New nuclear fuel design ready for full-scale testing

MIT Technology Review : Lightbridge, a nuclear engineering company in Tysons Corner, Virginia, has announced its plans to begin testing a new design for nuclear fuel rods in a full-scale reactor. Commercial reactors are typically powered by thousands of metal rods filled with uranium oxide pellets and submerged in water to create steam. The Lightbridge design uses a zirconium–uranium alloy molded into a spiral-shaped helical rod. The alloy boosts the heat transfer rate and the shape expands the surface area to increase the efficiency of the water heating process. Replacing the fuel rods alone could increase power output by 10%. And installing larger turbines could increase that to 17%. The design, if successful and safe, could provide a bump in efficiency that counters the growing costs, due to security concerns, of nuclear reactors.