Implications Of Results From The Advanced Gas Reactor Fuel Development And Qualification Program On Licensing Of Modular Htgrs

Download or read book Implications of Results from the Advanced Gas Reactor Fuel Development and Qualification Program on Licensing of Modular HTGRs written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The high level of safety of modular high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) designs is achieved by passively maintaining core temperatures below fission product release thresholds under all envisioned accident scenarios. This level of fuel performance and fission product retention reduces the radioactive source term by many orders of magnitude relative to other reactor types but is predicated on exceptionally high coated-particle fuel fabrication quality and excellent fuel performance under normal operation and accident conditions. The Advanced Gas Reactor Fuel Development and Qualification (AGR) Program decided to qualify for uranium oxide/uranium carbide (UCO) TRISO coated-particle fuel in an operating envelope that would bound both pebble bed and prismatic modular HTGR options. By using a mixture of uranium oxide and uranium carbide, the kernel composition is engineered to minimize CO formation and fuel kernel migration, which is key to maintain to fuel integrity at the higher burnups, temperatures, and temperature gradients anticipated in prismatic HTGRs. Fuel fabrication conducted at both laboratory and engineering scale has demonstrated the ability to fabricate high quality UCO TRISO fuel with very low defects. The first irradiation (AGR 1) exposed about 300,000 TRISO fuel particles to a peak burnup of 19.6% FIMA, a peak fast-neutron fluence of about 4.3 × 1025 n/m2, and a maximum time-averaged fuel temperature of about 1,200°C without a single particle failure. The very low release of key metallic fission products (except silver) measured in post-irradiation examination (PIE) confirms the excellent performance measured under irradiation. Very low releases have been measured in accident simulation heatup testing (''safety testing'') after hundreds of hours at 1600 and 1700°C and no particle failures (no noble gas release measured) have been observed. Even after hundreds of hours at 1800°C, the releases are still very low indicative of only a small fraction of fuel failure. The implications of these results relative to safety design and analysis and licensing will be discussed to demonstrate the margins associated with UCO TRISO fuel.