In the Urals, 40 km east of Yekaterinburg, there is one of the first industrial nuclear power plants in the Soviet Union. It began to be built in 1955 and was named "Beloyarskaya NPP". In 1964, he gave electricity to the first power unit AMB-100 "Nuclear Mirny Big" with a capacity of 100 MW. Since 1967, the second one, AMB-200, has been in operation. The third block - BN-600 "Fast Neutrons" with a capacity of 600 MW - started operating in April 1980. Today, the power plant has three nuclear reactors. In 1981 and 1987 the first two were stopped. The third one remained in operation. Experts call fast neutron reactors "breeders", i.e. "breeders". They were used to produce weapons-grade plutonium from uranium. All Western countries have stopped such reactors for various reasons. And only the Beloyarsk NPP has the last such industrial power unit in the world. Its reliability and safety is very high.
Briefly about the reactor. Fuel assemblies - zirconium tubes - are loaded into its working area. They contain pellets of nuclear fuel, usually uranium U235. During the fission of fuel in the tubes, a lot of heat is released, which is removed from the hot zone (primary circuit) by molten metal sodium (or lead) or water under enormous pressure (so as not to boil). Sodium has a highradioactivity; in order not to take it out, the heat is transferred to the second circuit, which also contains metal or water under high pressure. Here, the coolant heats the liquid of the third circuit to boiling, and the steam is supplied to the turbines. Later, structures with water in all circuits appeared. Metal-metal-water reactors are theoretically more dangerous than pressurized water reactors. But they are more compact, which allows them to be used in transport. Beloyarsk NPP in the BN-600 reactor in the first two circuits has a metal coolant. The latter is steam-water with a sodium steam superheater.
Beloyarsk NPP-2 is the second (or rather the fourth) power plant in the line of construction. Four years of operation of the experimental unit BN-600 and processing of the information received led to the decision to add two more - BN-800 and BN-1200. After the Chernobyl accident, this work was stopped, but the project continued to be adjusted. Construction resumed in 2007.
The BN-800 block is intended for further development of the "fast neutron" technology, and the positive results obtained on it will allow:
- form a closed fuel cycle of nuclear power plants;
- more than 50 times increase the processing of already spent uranium, providing fuel for the country's nuclear power plants;
- partially dispose of NPP waste, use non-radioactive uranium U238 from dumps;
- put plutonium from decommissioned nuclear warheads into fuel circulation.
Beloyarsk NPP, taking into accountnew power units by 2022 will have a capacity of 2600 MW. In the coming years, the construction of block No. 5 - BN-1200 will begin.
The launch of several BN-1200 reactors at this and other nuclear power plants and the inclusion in the cycle of enterprises producing nuclear fuel form a system for its manufacture. So Russia will provide itself and friendly countries with this fuel for hundreds of years. Beloyarsk NPP will have to take its rightful place in this cycle, because on its units of various types, new solutions in the energy sector of the peaceful atom are being experimentally tested.
