Building upon the success of the first edition, the Nuclear Engineering Handbook, Second Edition, provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of nuclear power engineering. Consisting of chapters written by leading experts, this volume spans a wide range of topics in the areas of nuclear power reactor design and operation, nuclear fuel cycles, and radiation detection. Plant safety issues are addressed, and the economics of nuclear power generation in the 21st century are presented. The Second Edition also includes full coverage of Generation IV reactor designs, and new information on MRS technologies, small modular reactors, and fast reactors.

This updated version of Nuclear Energy Series NF-T-2.1 provides information on all aspects of fuel failures in current nuclear power plant operations.

Originally published in 1983, this book presents both the technical and political information necessary to evaluate the emerging threat to world security posed by recent advances in uranium enrichment technology. Uranium enrichment has played a relatively quiet but important role in the history of efforts by a number of nations to acquire nuclear weapons and by a number of others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For many years the uranium enrichment industry was dominated by a single method, gaseous diffusion, which was technically complex, extremely capital-intensive, and highly inefficient in its use of energy. As long as this remained true, only the richest and most technically advanced nations could afford to pursue the enrichment route to weapon acquisition. But during the 1970s this situation changed dramatically. Several new and far more accessible enrichment techniques were developed, stimulated largely by the anticipation of a rapidly growing demand for enrichment services by the world-wide nuclear power industry. This proliferation of new techniques, coupled with the subsequent contraction of the commercial market for enriched uranium, has created a situation in which uranium enrichment technology might well become the most important contributor to further nuclear weapon proliferation. Some of the issues addressed in this book are: A technical analysis of the most important enrichment techniques in a form that is relevant to analysis of proliferation risks; A detailed projection of the world demand for uranium enrichment services; A summary and critique of present institutional non-proliferation arrangements in the world enrichment industry, and An identification of the states most likely to pursue the enrichment route to acquisition of nuclear weapons.