2003 Colloquium on High Burnup Fuels for LWRs

23 January 2003
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Overview

Nearly thirty people attended a full day colloquium on issues of high burnup fuels that was held at MIT on January 23, 2003. Eight speakers from the US and Europe described the fuel performance and safety concerns associated with increasing the nuclear fuel burnup*.

This ranges from changes to fuel material grain structure to increased tendency to fail the cladding during design basis accidents such as Loss of Coolant accidents (LOCA) and Reactivity Insertion Accidents (RIA). The fuel performance and accident modeling capability development at the largest nuclear utility in the world (Electricite de France) were described. The multi-national experiments to characterize the fuel behavior being conducted at the Halden experimental reactor in the Netherlands and at the Phebus experimental reactor in France were also described at this conference.

The 2002 analysis submitted by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that addressed the criteria for fuel integrity during transients at high burnup was presented. The research program of the NRC was described as well. Finally, the MIT program for fuel performance model development was also presented. All the presentations and many related papers , including presentations at the 2002 NRC research information exchange meeting, are available on a CD that can be ordered from CANES.

*Burnup is the energy extracted per unit mass of nuclear fuel To provide this energy, the fuel has to have enough initial fissile material and/or generate enough fissile material during in-reactor service. Over the last thirty years, the initial fuel fissile enrichment in the US has grown from about 3% to about 5%, and with it the burnup has nearly doubled to about 50 MWd/kg in the recently discharged fuel. The most important advantage of the higher burnup is to allow for a longer fuel cycle, which allows a longer reactor operation cycle, without interruption for fuel reloading. In addition, the higher burnup reduces the cost of fuel fabrication and the volume needed for storage of discharged fuel.

Agenda