Session: 05-02 Fuel Performance Assessment

Paper Number: 63101

Start Time: August 5, 2021, 04:15 PM

63101 - Steady-State Performance Analysis of a Dual-Cladding Design for Accident Tolerant Fuel 

The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident has highlighted the fatal weaknesses of the currently using fuel system, global interest has expanded in exploring an alternative accident-tolerant fuel (ATF) with enhanced performance during not only accident conditions but also normal operations. Therefore, this paper proposed a novel Dual-Cladding design to decrease the probability of cladding failure and increase the accident-tolerant ability of fuel rod in 200MW Nuclear Heating Reactor II (NHR200-II). Compared to the single cladding of conventional PWR fuel, Dual-Cladding rod has bilayer zirconium-based alloy cladding, which means that an extra zircalloy cladding is added outside the inner cladding and the total diameter of the rod is unchanged. This concept can directly decrease the probability of cladding failure to 10% of typical value under normal operation according to relevant probabilistic risk assessment theory. On the other hand, enrichment of the pellet will be adjusted in this design. And there are also challenges to overcome, such as heat transfer between the two layers of cladding and fabrication of the rod. This paper showed the basic design of the Dual-Cladding fuel rod and analyzed the irradiation performance and mechanical behavior under long life operation and temperature field under normal operation. This concept of ATF rod provides a fresh and economical way to improve the accident-tolerant ability of currently using fuel in NHR200-II.

Presenting Author: Qianliang Deng Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Authors:

Qianliang Deng Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Songyang Li Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Dingqu Wang Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Yueyuan Jiang Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Zhihong Liu Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Wei Xiong Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Yalin Tian Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China