Westinghouse BWR Fuel Reliability - Recent Experience and Analyses
- Westinghouse Electric Sweden AB, SE-721 63 Vaesteraas (Sweden)
Fuel reliability and failure free fuel has always been one of the most important objectives in the development work at Westinghouse Electric Sweden. An important step in tailoring remedies against both primary and secondary fuel failures is to understand the failure mechanisms. Studies of the mechanisms behind both primary and secondary failures have been performed. For primary failures the recent efforts have been focused on debris fretting failures, since this has been the only mechanism that causes failures in Westinghouse BWR fuel for several years. A statistical analysis of debris fretting failures was performed. The results showed a strong dependency on flow velocity which could be related to a working hypothesis coupling to the excitation of vibrations and the pressure drop over an object in a flow. To increase the understanding of the secondary degradation mechanism, two test reactor studies have been performed. Also, trends related to residence time in core, burnup and power have been evaluated based on the Westinghouse fuel failure database. No clear trends could be seen regarding residence time or burnup up to {approx}40 MWd/kgU. Beyond {approx}40 MWd/kgU the secondary degradation seems to be less severe. One trend that could be identified was an increase in the severity of secondary degradation with increasing rod power. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21229273
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 2007 LWR Fuel Performance Meeting / TopFuel 2007, San Francisco, CA (United States), 30 Sep - 3 Oct 2007; Other Information: Country of input: France; 6 refs; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2007 LWR Fuel Performance Meeting / TopFuel 2007 'Zero by 2010', 683 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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