Modified CANDU Reactor MCR as an Early-Deployable Nuclear Workhorse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Safe, simple and soon deployable are the imperatives for each SMR concept today. Only this SMR has the potential to become a nuclear workhorse in the fight against climate change if it is available soon, in large numbers and deployable worldwide. Therefore the assessment of the usefulness of an SMR concept must not only relate to the reactor itself. Only a holistic view of the entire nuclear fuel cycle with the given SMR as the central part between the front-end and back-end can lead to viable decisions. The IAEA lists more than 120 SMR concepts in its Handbook 2022. Time pressure is forcing us to critical selection of a promising reactor concept and to combine innovative solutions with tried and established technical and administrative networks. Against this background, the Modified CANDU Reactor (MCR) is proposed as additional SMR design. The MCR has two obvious modifications compared to the well-known and globally proven CANDU design: a) spherical fuel elements (pebbles) with ceramic cladding b) vertical arrangement of the pressure tubes. Intended for the generation of heat and electricity close to the consumer, the construction of a plant with MCR is preferably carried out underground close to the surface. The Herrenknecht VSM-shaft-tunnel technology is planned for the construction of the structures. For the transportation of irradiated fuel elements, (extended) interim storage and final disposal, technologies are proposed (Initial Barrier; TRIPLE C) that have already been published elsewhere. In order to provide a basis for further scientific and technical discussions, an attempt was made to incorporate the MCR concept into the existing CANDU SMR TM design. The resulting combined “overlapping” concept has not yet been discussed with the CANDU developing and operating countries. The authors hope for a fruitful discussion and are looking for future cooperation with the CANDU SMR TM manufacturer (CANDU Energy Inc. Canada), as well as with the countries that traditionally use CANDU reactors (China, India, South Korea) and Norway in future maybe too.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".