Nuclear power technologies at the stage of sustainable nuclear power development

Abstract It is not simple to solve the problem of competitiveness of nuclear power technologies in evolutionary upgrading the conventional nuclear power plants (NPP) such as light water reactors (LWR), which requires high expenditure for safety. Moreover, the existing LWRs cannot provide nuclear power (NP) for a long time (hundreds of years) because the efficiency of use of natural uranium is low and closing the nuclear fuel cycle (NFC) for those reactors is not expedient. The highlighted problem can be solved in the way of use of innovative nuclear power technology in which natural uranium power potential is used effectively and the intrinsic conflict between economic and safety requirements has been essentially mitigated. The technology that is most available and practically demonstrated is the use of reactors SVBR-100 — small power multi-purpose modular fast reactors (100 MWe) cooled by lead–bismuth coolant (LBC). This technology has been mastered for nuclear submarines’ reactors in Russia. High technical and economical parameters of the NPP based on RF SVBR-100 are determined from the fact that the potential energy stored in LBC per a volume unit is the lowest. The compactness of the reactor facility SVBR-100 that results from integral arrangement of the primary circuit equipment allows realizing renovation of power-units LWRs, the vessels’ lifetime of which has been expired. So due to this fact, high economical efficiency can be obtained. The paper also validates the economical advantage of launching the uranium-fueled fast reactors with further changeover to the closed NFC with use of plutonium extracted from the own spent nuclear fuel in comparison with launching fast reactors directly with on uranium-plutonium fuel on the basis of plutonium extraction from spent nuclear fuel of LWRs.