LIGHT WATER REACTOR ACCIDENT TOLERANT FUELS IRRADIATION TESTING

Conference · Tue Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 2015

OSTI ID:1236847

Carmack, William Jonathan ^[1]; Barrett, Kristine Eloise ^[1]; Chichester, Heather Jean MacLean ^[1]

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1. Idaho National Laboratory

The purpose of Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF) experiments is to test novel fuel and cladding concepts designed to replace the current zirconium alloy uranium dioxide (UO2) fuel system. The objective of this Research and Development (R&D) is to develop novel ATF concepts that will be able to withstand loss of active cooling in the reactor core for a considerably longer time period than the current fuel system while maintaining or improving the fuel performance during normal operations, operational transients, design basis, and beyond design basis events. It was necessary to design, analyze, and fabricate drop-in capsules to meet the requirements for testing under prototypic LWR temperatures in Idaho National Laboratory's Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). Three industry led teams and one DOE team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided fuel rodlet samples for their new concepts for ATR insertion in 2015. As-built projected temperature calculations were performed on the ATF capsules using the BISON fuel performance code. BISON is an application of INL’s Multi-physics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), which is a massively parallel finite element based framework used to solve systems of fully coupled nonlinear partial differential equations. Both 2D and 3D models were set up to examine cladding and fuel performance.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1236847
• Report Number(s): INL/CON-15-34949
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

ATF Irradiation Testing
Accident Tolerant Fuels
FCRD AFC
LWR ATF