Westinghouse Electric Company recently declared bankruptcy because of financial difficulties resulting from schedule delays and cost overruns on nuclear reactor construction projects in Geogia and South Carolina. Westinghouse, which is a subsidiary of Japan’s Toshiba, will end their nuclear reactor construction business. Toshiba is considering the sale of Westinghouse because it is also having severe financial difficulties connected to accounting fraud unrelated to the nuclear industry. While Westinghouse will no longer be constructing nuclear reactors, it will continue to sell nuclear fuel and is releasing a new type of nuclear reactor fuel.
Westinghouse Electric Company formally announced Tuesday that it was launching its new accident-tolerant nuclear fuel solution called EnCore TM. Westinghouse made the announcement at its Fuel Users’ Group Meeting which is attended by nuclear fuel customers from around the world. Westinghouse says that EnCore Fuel “is intended to offer design-basis-altering safety, greater uranium efficiency.” They claim that the economic benefits of switching to the new fuel could rise as high as millions of dollars. Westinghouse will release the new fuel in two phases.
The first phase of the new fuel will feature uranium silicide pellets with a new cladding. The pellets will have higher density and higher thermal conductivity than previous fuels. The new cladding has reduced oxidation and hydrogen pickup when compared to previous fuels. These changes will result in extending the life of the cladding and increasing the resistance of the cladding to wear. The cladding will also be able to withstand prolonged exposure to high temperatures of steam and air up to fourteen hundred degrees Centigrade in the event of a loss-of-cooling-accident, reactivity-initiated accident and other beyond-design-basis conditions.
The second phase of the new fuel will feature silicon-carbide cladding. This new cladding is intended to offer increase safety benefits in case of beyond-design-basis accidents. It has a very high melting point of twenty eight hundred degrees Centigrade. It also has a very small reaction with water which means that there will be very little generation of heat and hydrogen in beyond-design-basis accidents.
Michele DeWitt is the senior vice president for Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel. He said “Westinghouse is aggressively pursuing the benefits of accident tolerant fuel for our customers. As the leading supplier of nuclear fuel and components globally, Westinghouse has developed a world-class network of research, design and manufacturing partners. We are leveraging the breadth and depth of our resources, combined with U.S. Department of Energy awards, as well as utility funding, to collaborate with respected industry partners in order to deliver EnCore Fuel to the market on an aggressive, accelerated schedule. We are on track to manufacture EnCore Fuel lead test rods as early as 2018, with lead test assembly insertion planned starting in 2022.”
In 2016, uranium prices hit a twelve year low. The Fukushima disaster in Japan exacerbated an already declining uranium market. All fifty nuclear reactors in Japan were shut down and are only now being restarted one by one. Germany is phasing out nuclear power. France is reducing the use of nuclear power. There is a big imbalance between the supply of uranium and the demand for uranium that will not improve in the near future. It will be interesting to see if Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel division will be able to profit from the release of this new fuel.
