Clean and Environmentally Safe Advanced Reactor

The Clean and Environmentally Safe Advanced Reactor (CAESAR) is a nuclear reactor concept created by Claudio Filippone, the Director of the Center for Advanced Energy Concepts at the University of Maryland, College Park and head of the ongoing CAESAR Project. The concept's key element is the use of steam as a moderator, making it a type of reduced moderation water reactor. Because the density of steam may be controlled very precisely, Filippone claims it can be used to fine-tune neutron fluxes to ensure that neutrons are moving with an optimal energy profile to split  nuclei – in other words, cause fission.

The CAESAR reactor design exploits the fact that the fission products and daughter isotopes produced via nuclear reactions also decay to produce additional delayed neutrons. Filippone claims that unlike conventional water-cooled fission reactors, where fission occurring in enriched  fuel rods moderated by liquid-water coolant ultimately creates a Maxwellian thermal neutron flux profile, the neutron energy profile from delayed neutrons varies widely. In a conventional reactor, he theorizes, the moderator slows these neutrons down so that they cannot contribute to the  reaction;  has a comparatively large cross-section for neutrons at high energies.

Filippone maintains that when steam is used as the moderator, the average neutron energy is increased from that of a liquid water-moderated reactor such that the delayed neutrons persist until they hit another nucleus. The resulting extremely high neutron economy, he claims, will make it possible to maintain a self-sustaining reaction in fuel rods of pure , once the reactor has been started by enriched fuel.

Skeptics
, however point out that it is generally believed that a controlled, sustained chain reaction is not possible with . It can undergo fission when impacted by an energetic neutron with over 1 MeV of kinetic energy. But the high-energy neutrons produced by  fission (after quickly losing energy by inelastic scattering), are not, themselves, sufficient to induce enough successive fissions in  to create a critical system (one in which the number of neutrons created by fission is equal to the number absorbed). Instead, bombarding  with neutrons below the 1 MeV fission threshold causes it to absorb them without fissioning (becoming ) and decay by beta emission to  (which is itself fissile). The energy of delayed neutrons is so low that contribution to  fission is almost 0.0000, requiring some fissile material to keep the reactor safely under prompt criticality: (e.g.  in natural uranium and preferably also some moderator, possibly outside the extra-fast core).

See also 
 Nuclear fission
 Nuclear reactor
 Nuclear reactor physics
 Nuclear power
 Nuclear power plant
 Future energy development
 Energy amplifier
 Nuclear waste
 Supercritical Water Reactor

External links 
The Clean And Environmentally Safe Advanced Reactor (CAESAR) Project
Hail, Caesar Economist article
Putting Nuclear Waste to Work Popular Mechanics article from 1998 describing a related reactor design (NPTRE) proposed by Dr. Filippone.
A Second Caesar to Change the Course of History? Article from University of Maryland newsletter.

Category:Nuclear power reactor types
Category:Pseudophysics