Progress Report on Mockup Irradiation Capsule Fuel Measurements at LANSCE

Technical Report · Fri Sep 16 04:00:00 EDT 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1893648· OSTI ID:1893648

Vogel, Sven C. ^[1]; Angell, James R. ^[2]; Carver, Dale Travis ^[1]; Craft, Aaron E. ^[2]; Fairbanks, Christopher Mark West ^[1]; Gross, Brian J ^[2]; Harp, Jason M. ^[3]; Hosemann, Peter ^[4]; Larson, Eric John ^[1]; Lin, Jay ^[4]; Long, Alexander Makenzie ^[1]; Mehta, Vedant Kiritkumar ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
2. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
3. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
4. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)

Irradiation tests are a key component of nuclear fuel development and identifying typical and atypical regions in the irradiated fuel volume relies on very few characterization techniques. The goal of the effort reported here is to provide complementary measurements adding to the available parameter space for post irradiation examination as well as to inform subsequent hot cell PIE examinations by identifying typical and atypical regions with respect to microstructure, tomographic data, or isotope densities. Pulsed neutrons, enabling diffraction as well as energy-resolved neutron imaging and neutron absorption resonance spectroscopy, offer unique capabilities for this purpose. Time-of-flight neutron diffraction has the potential to offer efficient, non-destructive and non-contact microstructural characterization of irradiated fuel specimen with spatial resolution of 1 mm³ to 1 cm³ while for energy-resolved neutron imaging (and by extension tomography) a resolution of 100 μm³ was demonstrated. The potential results include crystallinity vs. amorphous volumes and microstructural information such as phase compositions, lattice strains (indicative of residual stresses or chemistry variations) and textures from the diffraction data as well as distances (e.g. pellet to cladding), cracks, and isotope densities of minor actinides, fission products as well as fission gas partial pressures e.g. in the plenum from energy resolved neutron imaging.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program; USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: 89233218CNA000001
• OSTI ID: 1893648
• Report Number(s): LA-UR-22-30854
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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