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60439. For information about Argonne and its pioneering science and technology programs, see www.anl.gov.

ABSTRACT. It is widely recognized that the developing world is the next area for major energy demand growth, including demand for new and advanced nuclear energy systems. With limited existing industrial and grid infrastructures, there will be an important need for future nuclear energy systems that can provide small or moderate increments of electric power (10-700 MWe) on small or immature grids in developing nations. Most recently, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) has identified, as one of its key objectives, the development and demonstration of concepts for small and medium sized reactors (SMRs) that can be globally deployed while assuring a high level of proliferation resistance. Lead-cooled systems offer several key advantages in meeting these goals. The small lead-cooled fast reactor concept known as the Small Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor (SSTAR) reactor has been under ongoing development under the U.S. Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems Initiative. It a system designed to provide energy security to developing nations while incorporating features to achieve nonproliferation aims, anticipating GNEP objectives. This paper presents the motivation for development of internationally deployable nuclear energy systems as well as a summary of one such system, SSTAR, which is the U.S. Generation IV Lead-cooled Fast Reactor system. INTRODUCTION.It is widely known that the developing world is the next area for major energy demand growth. This is the part of the world where population growth is high and, furthermore, the gap between the current levels of energy availability and the levels needed to sustain economic growth is also great. There is a diversity of different scenarios for supplky of expanded energy resources ranging from large and highlyt concentrated population centers of countries like China and india to remote and isolated communities (which also may be quite large). In addition, in many cases, existing electric grid capacity is limited and not readily able to accept lthe large increments of generating capacity represented by current central station nuclear power plants. Finally, industrial infrastructures are frequently limited and not able to provide the support needed for large central station plant construction, maintenenace and operation.

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The STAR-LM 300 to 400 MWt class modular, factory fabricated, fully transportable, proliferation resistant, autonomous, reactor system achieves passive safety by taking advantage of the intrinsic benefits of inert lead-bismuth eutectic heavy liquid metal coolant, 100+% natural circulation heat transport, a fast neutron spectrum core utilizing high thermal conductivity transuranic nitride fuel, redundant passive air cooling of the outside of the guard/containment vessel driven by natural circulation, and seismic isolation where required by site conditions. Postulated loss-of-heat sink without scram, overcooling without scram, and unprotected transient overpower accidents are analyzed for the 300 MWt STAR-LM design using a coupled thermal hydraulics-neutron kinetics plant dynamics analysis computer code. In all cases, STAR-LM is calculated to exhibit passive safety with peak cladding and coolant temperatures remaining within the existing database for lead-bismuth eutectic coolant and ferritic steel core materials.

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