Research Needs for Uranium-Zirconium- Based Metallic Fuels

Technical Report · Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1634988· OSTI ID:1634988

Aitkaliyeva, Assel ^[1]; Tonks, Michael ^[1]; Hirschhorn, Jacob ^[1]; Powers, Jeff ^[1]; Greenquist, Ian ^[1]; Beeler, Benjamin ^[2]

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1. University of Florida
2. North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC (United States)

The purpose of this report is to summarize the needs and present recommendations related to the future direction for U-Zr-based metallic fuel research (including binary U-Zr and ternary U-Pu-Zr alloys). These needs and recommendations were determined by subject matter experts from various institutions during a two-day workshop held at the University of Florida in November, 2019. During open-floor discussions, the highest priority gaps in our understanding of U-Zr-based fuels were down-selected, and near- and long-term needs that directly impact the implementation of these metallic fuels were identified. The identified near-term needs include investigation of the following phenomena: i) swelling and fission gas release, ii) fuel-cladding chemical interaction, iii) phase evolution/constituent redistribution, and iv) thermal properties of the fuels. The long-term needs are: i) investigation of fuel creep and plasticity and ii) fission product (lanthanide) transport. In addition, there was general agreement that all institutions and subject matter experts would benefit from an open-source metallic fuels database with thermophysical property and microstructural data, along with fuel operation/irradiation history, which should be regularly updated with vetted information from new experimental and computational investigations and used to advance metallic fuels research and development. Finally, we recommend that metallic fuel research should be ongoing and that fuel qualification and fuel optimization should be equally prioritized; research combining experiments with modeling and simulation has the largest potential impact.

• 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: 1634988
• Report Number(s): INL/EXT--20-58719-Rev000
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
Fuel
Metallic
U-Zr
uranium
zirconium