Uranium oxides are fascinating materials not only owing to their technological significance in nuclear fuel applications [1] but also with respect to their dynamical properties [2], valence orbital configuration [3] and elementary excitations [4]. Understanding of the electronic, magnetic and crystal structural properties of uranium dioxide (UO2) was advanced significantly [5,6] after establish...

During loss-of-coolant (LOCA) accidents the primary reactor coolant system shall be maintained in a safe state so that the coolability of fuel rods was maintained and the emergency core cooling criteria must be met. These criteria were accepted originally for Western design reactors and the same criteria were applied in Hungary to the Paks NPP as well. However the WER type reactor has different...

Iodine-induced stress-corrosion cracking (ISCC), a known failure mode for nuclear fuel cladding, occurs when iodine generated during the irradiation of a nuclear fuel pellet escapes the pellet through diffusion or thermal cracking and chemically interacts with the inner surface of the clad material, inducing a subsequent effect on the cladding’s resistance to mechanical stress. To complement ex...

This paper describes a multi-scale modeling approach to compute the large-strain deformation of zirconium alloy cladding, which is of interest to the study of fuel rod behaviors in transient and accident conditions. A Visco-Plastic Self-Consistent (VPSC) polycrystal plasticity model representing polycrystals by weighted orientations of single crystals has been implemented as the constitutive la...