Thorium fuel for light water reactors—reducing proliferation potential of nuclear power fuel cycle

The proliferation potential of the light water reactor fuel cycle may be significantly reduced by utilization of thorium as a fertile component of the nuclear fuel. The main challenge of thorium utilization is to design a core and a fuel cycle, which would be proliferation‐resistant and economically feasible. This challenge is met by the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor (RTR) concept presented in this paper. So far the concept has been applied to a Russian design of a 1,000 MWe pressurized water reactor, known as a WER‐1000, and designated as WERT. The following are the main results of the preliminary reference design: The amount of plutonium contained in the RTR spent fuel stockpile is reduced by 80 percent in comparison with a WER of a current design. The isotopic composition of the RTR‐Pu greatly increases the probability of preini‐tiation and yield degradation of a nuclear explosion. An extremely large Pu‐238 content causes correspondingly large heat emission, which would complicate the design of an explosiv...