Students must be familiar with existing (thermal) reactors. A significant portion of NEEP 512 is devoted to comparing the features and performance of fast reactors to existing commercial (light water, thermal) reactors.

No textbook is used. The most "recent" text, "Fast Breeder Reactors" by Walter & Reynolds, is 20 years old and assumes fast reactor technology based on large, oxide-fuelled reactors. Since the most promising technology is small, modular, and metal-fuelled, most of the course materials are taken from peer-reviewed journal articles.

Course Objectives: It is the instructor's intention to...

introduce students to reactor concepts and designs radically different from those employed in today's commercial utility sector.

present a reactor concept whose inherent features permit much greater reliance on passive safety than today's designs.

introduce students to the concept of an "integral" reactor in which the fuel cycle is closed on-site with minimal waste volume and low resulting activity.

Course Outcomes: Students must be able to...

compare the relative merits of metal fuel to oxide and carbide/nitride fuel, specifically with respect to peak fuel temperature, FCMI and FCCI.

calculate flux and adjoint flux (importance) distributions for neutrons given core composition and geometry.

calculate the reactivity worth of specificed changes to the fast reactor core.

explain how the stability of fast reactors differs from those of thermal reactors and what this implies for a best choice of type and size of fast reactor.

evaluate heat transfer coefficients for sodium under both forced and natural convection.

size a sodium tank for the fast reactor primary system based on the sodium's thermal capacity and the heat-removal ability of auxiliary passive residual heat removal systems.

discuss the advantages of the electrorefining operation with metal fuel to the conventional PUREX process with oxide fuel.

search the nuclear engineering literature for information on topics of interest to them.

NEEP 512 meets three times per week for conventional, 50 minute lectures.

The following statement indicates which of the following considerations are included in this course: economic, environmental, ethical, political, societal, health and safety, manufacturability, sustainability.

NEEP 512 includes strong components of environmental and sustainability issues because of the nature of the reactor type under discussion. Because the fuel cycle is a U-238/Pu-239 fuel cycle, making far better use of uranium resources than a conventional light water reactor, it enables use of nuclear energy for millenia instead of centuries. Because the reactor design is "integral" in its incorporation of on-site waste reprocessing and folding fuel back into the reactor, along with minimal volume and activity of resulting waste forms, it has enormous consequencies for mitigating the environmental impact of nuclear energy.

Safety is also a major issue underlying NEEP 512, because fast reactors are not guaranteed to have the good stability characteristics of light water reactors. Choices promoting good stability are emphasized in the course.

NEEP 512 is appropriate as a senior technical elective or a graduate student breadth elective. Because of the nature of the subject matter, the course provides a forum for discussion of contemporary issues, including environmental issues. In particular, the topics of resource use, closing the nuclear fuel cycle and disposition of weapons-grade plutonium have been and continue to be important topics integrated into the course.