Abstract
Through the early 2000’s, nuclear fuel cladding failure resulting from pellet-cladding interaction in commercial pressurized water reactor fuel was managed successfully by incorporating power ramp restrictions. Within the past decade, however, cladding failures have again begun to appear, often correlated to missing pellet surface defects, and further aggravated by modern reactor operating strategies demanding higher fuel duty operations. In response, renewed efforts in fuel behavior modeling and simulation are being pursued to improve our understanding of the conditions that can lead to missing pellet surface related cladding failure. This paper describes a methodology used to model pellet-cladding interaction related failures observed in commercial pressurized water reactors using the BISON fuel performance code developed at Idaho National Laboratory. In order to accomplish this goal, a three-step process is followed: 1) A failure-stress threshold is developed by using BISON code to model ramp test with known pellet-clad interaction related failures, 2) BISON analysis is applied to a commercial pressurized water reactor cycle startup with one rod confirmed to contain a missing pellet surface defect, and 3) an missing pellet surface sensitivity study of a cycle startup of the same commercial pressurized water reactor which contained a failed fuel rod of un-identified type. The analysis results described in this paper serve to illustrate the BISON code capabilities for modeling pressurized water reactor fuel subjected to higher duty power events.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 131-142 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Nuclear Engineering and Design |
| Volume | 324 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2017 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This research was supported by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors ( www.casl.gov ), an Energy Innovation Hub ( http://www.energy.gov/hubs ) for Modeling and Simulation of Nuclear Reactors under U.S. Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The US Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.
Keywords
- Light water reactor
- Missing pellet surface
- Pellet-clad interaction
- Stress corrosion cracking