Potential of CANDLE reactor on sustainable development and strengthened proliferation resistance

CANDLE reactor generates energy by using only natural or depleted uranium as make up fuel and achieves about 40% burn up without fuel recycling (Sekimoto, H., Ryu, K., Yoshimura, Y., 2001. CANDLE: the new burnup strategy. Nucl. Sci. Eng. 139 (3), 306–317). These distinctive characteristics eliminate the necessity of both enrichment and reprocessing processes that are recognized as essentially inevitable parts in the conventional nuclear energy concept.This paper describes that the potential performance of CANDLE reactor to meet a projected energy demand growth of the world with stabilizing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and simultaneously minimize the risk of nuclear material proliferation.A type of CANDLE reactor with moderate initial fissile inventory is feasible to be deployed with prompt enough introduction pace to satisfy the worldwide energy growth and limit the carbon dioxide concentration to about 550 ppm in the next century. Ultimately high proliferation resistance performance as a fission energy system is found for the CANDLE system due to the elimination of most vulnerable processes in the conventional fuel cycle.