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At least 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2019

The Fission Accelerated Steady State Test (FAST) -- A Revised Capsule Design for the Accelerated Testing of Advanced Reactor Fuels

In an effort to improve the development and testing of novel nuclear fuels, a detailed evaluation on reducing the size of fuel specimens for irradiation has been performed. Theoretically speaking, reducing the fuels diameter and incorporating an inner capsule while maintaining the original outside diameter of the experiment significantly reduces the experiment’s sensitivity to fabrication tolerances and drastically reduces the time necessary to reach a desired fuel burnup; both of which improve the cost and schedule associated with the fuel testing. Simulations of this reduced diameter, double encapsulated concept have been performed using Abaqus, MCNP, and ORIGEN. The results of the Abaqus simulations are beyond the scope of this summary and will not be presented herein. For results of these Abaqus simulations, see Beausoleil [2]. The models were tested using various parameters and design deviations which were then compared to the original Advanced Fuels Campaign (AFC) designs. The results of these simulations confirmed that the introduction of a second capsule coupled to a reduction in the fuel pin diameter significantly reduces the experiment’s sensitivity to fabrication tolerances and reduces the time to reach a desired burnup by nearly an order of magnitude. The original AFC design requires approximately 11.7 years to reach 30 Atom % Heavy Metal (at% HM) burnup. A burnup of 30 at% HM can be reached in approximately 2.5 to 3.5 years (irradiation position dependent) with a fuel diameter ½ (~0.097 in. diameter) that of the original AFC design. An added benefit to the fuel pin diameter reduction is that more specimens can be irradiated in any given cycle. Essentially, significantly more specimens can be tested and incur more burnup over a given operating cycle relative to the AFC design. This allows the development of a large test matrix of samples with rapid throughput in ATR.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗