Cooperation deal advances South Korea's fast reactor development

PGSFR = Prototype Generation-IV Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor

Cooperation deal to develop advanced reactor | World Nuclear News:

From source article: "GSFR's reactor system.
It is a pool-type reactor where a small core as well as
the pumps and heat exchangers of the primary
circuit are immersed in a pool of sodium coolant.
A secondary circuit develops steam and drives a
turbine-generator set (Image: KAERI)"

South Korean designers have secured help from Argonne National Laboratory to develop an advanced reactor, which is partly based on America's successful EBR-II prototype. A 150 MWe sodium-cooled demonstration unit is slated for 2028.
...
The prototype would produce 150 MWe for the grid, but its main purpose is to demonstrate its fuel: PGSFR is to use metal fuel pins composed of low-enriched uranium and zirconium, and it can be subsequently reloaded with fuel that also contains transuranic elements produced in other reactors during power generation and which are usually treated as waste. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) datasheet, the objective of the PGSFR project is to test the performance of this fuel, and show PGSFR's ability to transmute the transuranics.
...

Argonne said, "the metal fuel technology base was developed at Argonne in the 1980s and 1990s; its inherent safety potential was demonstrated in the landmark tests conducted on the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) in April 1986. They demonstrated the safe shutdown and cooling of the reactor without operator action following a simulated loss-of-cooling accident."...

The IAEA said PGSFR has a passive reactor shutdown system in addition to "a combination of passive and active decay heat removal systems" which give it "sufficient capacity to remove decay heat in all design basis events without operator action."

Read the entire article at World Nuclear News

The Argonne National Laboratory produced Argonne, KAERI to develop prototype nuclear reactor