Can a pebble bed reactor melt down?

X-energy , located just outside the nation’s capital in Rockville, Maryland, is working on a pebble bed, high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that the company says can’t melt down. The company’s Xe-100 reactor and specialized uranium-based pebble fuel could be available in the market as early as the late 2020s.

What happened to pebble bed reactors?

A German company promoted the pebble bed design for a couple of years with high expectations that Russia would buy the technology. These hopes never materialized, however, and in 1991, it abandoned the reactor design citing a lack of realistic business prospects.

Are pebble bed reactors safe?

Moormann, Kemp and Li’s main concern is that because pebble bed reactors are regarded as intrinsically safe, HTR-PM has been built without a high-pressure, leak-tight containment structure to serve asbackup in case of accidental release of radioactive material, and it also does not have a redundant active cooling …

How does a pebble bed safe reactor work?

Pebble-bed design Simply piling enough pebbles together in a critical geometry will allow for criticality. The pebbles are held in a vessel, and an inert gas (such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide) circulates through the spaces between the fuel pebbles to carry heat away from the reactor.

How much does a pebble bed reactor cost?

The cost of China’s smaller modular pebble bed nuclear reactors should only be $420 million for a 210 MW version and $1.2 billion for a threepack that could be a dropin replacement for the coal burner at China’s many coal plants. The US has seen prices for US 1.2 GW AP1000 nuclear plants is far higher.

Can modern nuclear reactors meltdown?

A modern reactor is designed both to make a meltdown unlikely, and to contain one should it occur. In a modern reactor, a nuclear meltdown, whether partial or total, should be contained inside the reactor’s containment structure. A nuclear meltdown may be part of a chain of disasters.