Improved resource utilization by advanced burner reactors with breed-and-burn blankets

Another scenario examined in this paper is a 3-stage closed energy system: TRU extracted from Stage-1 PWRs used fuel is charged to the seed of Stage-2 S&B cores while the Trans-Th (mainly 233U) extracted from Stage-2 S&B blanket discharged fuel is used as the fissile feed for Stage-3 PWRs. It is estimated that 1GWe of S&B SFRs in such a 3-Stage energy system can support 3.2 GWe of PWRs versus ∼1.7 GWe of PWRs that can be supported by 1 GWe of CR = 0.5 Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR).