Abstract
Concerning about global warming due to emission of greenhouse effect gas like CO2, it is essentially important to make efforts to obtain more reliable and stable energy supply by extended use of nuclear energy including high temperature heat from nuclear reactors, because it can supply a large amount of energy and its plants emit only little amount of CO2 during their lifetime. Hence, efforts are to be continuously devoted to establish and upgrade technologies of High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) which can supply high-temperature heat with high thermal efficiency as well as high heat-utilizing efficiency. It is also expected that making basic researches at high temperature using HTGR will contribute to innovative basic research in future. Then, the construction of High Temperature engineering Test Reactor (HTTR), which is an HTGR with a maximum helium coolant temperature of 950 deg. C at the reactor outlet, was decided by the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) in 1987 and is now under way by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI).
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