4 ms·
"Fuel input per gigawatt output: 250 tons raw uranium?" Come on, Wired. 250 tons is a quantity, and gigawatt is a rate. Is it supposed to be a gigawatt times
by mquander 17y ago
"Fuel input per gigawatt output: 250 tons raw uranium?"
Come on, Wired. 250 tons is a quantity, and gigawatt is a rate. Is it supposed to be a gigawatt times the lifetime of the plant?
- pieter 17y agoit's probably 250 tons / year for a 1 gigawatt plant
- Kadin 17y agoThat might make sense if they're talking about the mass of the entire fuel rod assemblies (which all become high-level waste, since we don't reprocess in the U.S., instead treating reactors as furnaces that simply "burn" Uranium). However, it seems suspiciously large if they're actually talking about the amount of U-235 that's fissioned off.
- jedc 17y agoProbably not... re-fueling is a very time-intensive process. (The reactors I worked on were designed to be re-fueled every 25-30 years.) 250 tons for a 1 gigawatt constant output seems more likely to me.
- sketerpot 17y agoI can clarify this. It's 250 tonnes of raw uranium, from which we get 35 tonnes of 3% enriched uranium, which give one gigawatt-year of electricity in a typical light water reactor.
- lutorm 17y agoYou might need 250 tons to get enough mass to get the power up to a gigawatt. While you are correct that the units are inconsistent, in a reactor you can't independently adjust power and fissile mass. (Or more accurately, you can lower the power output by a given mass, but you can't easily increase it.)
- qw 17y agoI was surprised they didn't compare it to the energy consumption of the Library of Congress