Several different fuel failure criteria have been used in previously NRC-sponsored SFP accident studies. Benjamin, et. al. used the onset of runaway fuel clad oxidation as the fuel failure criterion in NUREG/CR-0649 [Ref. 1]. This criterion was criticized because clad rupture can occur at a relatively low temperature causing a gap release. The consequences of gap release can be significant if t...

IRSN has carried out a State-of-the-Art-Review of the main experimental programmes related to fuel behaviour under Loss-of-Coolant-Accident (LOCA) conditions conducted from the 70s until now, that has been split in three parts. The second part is devoted to the question of the coolability of blocked regions in a rod bundle after ballooning in a LOCA. The main findings from this part are present...

This review summarizes the development of Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (GFR) concept from early 1970s until now, focusing specifically on structural materials and advanced fuel cladding materials. Materials for future nuclear energy systems must operate under more extreme conditions than those in current Gen II or III systems. These include higher temperatures, a displacement per atom, corrosive env...

This article is a commentary on our previous work entitled “Reassessment of oxidation-induced amorphization and dissolution Nb precipitates in Zr-Nb nuclear fuel cladding tube”, published Acta Materialia 2017. The highlight this 2017 paper discovery that solid-state can occur even when the motion atoms (or more precisely, all constituent elements amorphous material) not frozen-in. Although judg...

Due to outstanding physicochemical properties, ceramics are key engineering materials in many industrial domains. The evaluation of the damage created in ceramics employed in radiative media is a challenging problem for electronic, space, and nuclear industries. In this latter field, ceramics can be used as immobilization forms for radioactive wastes, inert fuel matrices for actinide transmutat...