Author(s)

Iryna Korduba¹, Zhanna Patlashenko², Olena Zhukova^1*

¹Department of Environmental Protection and Labor Protection Technologies, Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, Kyiv, Ukraine.
²Department of Education Methodology for Sustainable Development of the State Environmental Academy of Postgraduate Education and Management, Kyiv, Ukraine.

Today, the most urgent problem of the existing and future nuclear power industry is to ensure the nuclear and environmental safety of the operation of nuclear power reactor units (NPPs) and nuclear power plants (NPPs). It is solved thanks to the application of deeply echeloned protection and an anti-accident complex of methods and means for effective control of the operation of active reactor zones (AZR). However, the danger of existing NPPs in the world from time to time manifests itself in the form of severe post-project accidents and catastrophes with the release into the environment of a significant amount of radioactive materials dangerous for all living things. The results of the analysis show that the unconditional fulfillment of the main requirements of nuclear environmental safety and biocompatibility is possible only in the so-called wave nuclear reactor of the G-V generation, which, unlike reactors of the previous generations III, II+ and IV, does not require supercritical loading of the core with nuclear fuel. In the active zone of this reactor, nuclear-physical processes governed by physical law are implemented, which exclude the operator’s participation in regulating the reactivity of the reactor’s active zone, which makes it the reactor with the highest level of nuclear and environmental safety today, which is based on the principles of so-called internal safety, free from the human factor. The possibility of burning nuclear fuel based on U238 and Th232 in it expands the reserves of energetic nuclear fuel almost to inexhaustibility. The technology of nuclear reactors of the G5 generation through the secondary use of spent irradiated nuclear fuel (SNF) for the production of energy and energy raw materials with simultaneous burning of it to an environmentally safe state is able to quickly reduce the available stocks and further production of dangerous SNF, guarantee the nuclear and environmental safety of NPPs with reactors G5 and to technologically make nuclear post-project accidents and disasters impossible at the level of physical law with the complete elimination of the human factor.

Nuclear-Environmental Safety, Nuclear Power Reactor Unit, Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Nuclear Technologies of the Fifth Generation, Nuclear-Environmental Safety, Wave Reactor, Biocompatibility

Korduba, I. , Patlashenko, Z. and Zhukova, O. (2023) Prospects of Technological Improvement of Nuclear and Environmental Safety of World Energy. Open Journal of Ecology, 13, 536-548. doi: 10.4236/oje.2023.138033.