Nuclear Fuel: The Most Sophisticated Industrial Product You've Never Learned About

About this episode

This episode features fuel engineer Michael Seely discussing the complexities and advancements in nuclear fuel technology.

Nuclear fuel is nothing like the coal or gas it replaces. Where fossil fuels are destroyed in combustion, nuclear fuel must survive years of continuous fission inside a reactor and come out the other end looking almost exactly as it went in. In this episode, fuel engineer Michael Seely breaks down how uranium dioxide pellets are made, why the fuel rod is one of the most sophisticated manufactured objects in the world, and how an industry that once ran more than half its fleet on leaking fuel pins methodically engineered its way to near-zero failure rates by 2010. We also get into enrichment economics, the bespoke nature of reactor fuel design, the post-Fukushima push toward accident-tolerant and higher-burnup LEU Plus fuel, and why high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), the feedstock required by most advanced reactor concepts, requires 40 kilograms of natural uranium and six times the separative work of conventional fuel just to produce a single kilogram. If you want to understand why nuclear plants are built the way they are, why the water cooled reactor won, and what the fuel supply chain challenge really means for the advanced reactor industry, this is the episode to start…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Chris Keefer

Guest: Michael Seely

Topics covered

• nuclear fuel
• uranium processing
• reactor design
• fuel supply chain
• enrichment economics
• advanced reactors

Keywords

• nuclear fuel
• uranium dioxide
• fuel rods
• fission
• enrichment economics
• HALEU
• reactor design

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Decouple

Products: uranium dioxide pellets, high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), LEU Plus fuel

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