Rudolf Schulten

Rudolf Schulten (1923 to 1996) was a German physicist and professor at RWTH Aachen University who was the main developer of the pebble bed reactor design, an idea first invented by Farrington Daniels. His concept pressed silicon carbide coated uranium granules into hard, billiard ball like graphite spheres that serve as fuel for a high temperature, helium cooled reactor. The idea led to the AVR, an experimental pebble bed reactor of 46 megawatts thermal built at the Jülich Research Centre in West Germany, which ran for 21 years before it was shut down in the wake of Chernobyl and over safety issues. The design later fed the HTR-MODUL project, South Africa and its partners developed it as the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor until cancellation in 2010, and China now builds it in the HTR-10 and HTR-PM plants.