The renaissance of nuclear energy will reckon on the capability to deploy advanced reactor concepts that can enhance safety, improve resource utilization, and reduce capital costs. The Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley has historically been at the cutting-edge of the conception and development of advanced reactors. This talk will review some of the concepts currently under development, and will discuss the delights and the challenges that they provide to reactor designers. The concepts that will be discussed include (1) the seed-and-blanket sodium-cooled fast reactor, a burner system designed to make use of the leakage neutrons in a blanket operated according to a breed-and-burn cycle (no enrichment and no reprocessing) without the need to develop new cladding materials; (2) the reduced moderation boiling water reactor (RBWR), a tight lattice light-water reactor designed to accomplish missions typically reserved for liquid-metal-cooled systems such as breeding or actinides incineration; (3) the pebble bed fluoride-cooled high-temperature reactor (PB-FHR), a molten salt cooled technology capable to provide dispatchable peak power in addition to traditional base-load electrical power generation.
