Fuel test system for gallium-zirconium interaction at the texas AM university nuclear science center

摘要

The objective of this project is to design an unirradiated system to simulate temperature gradients in prototypic MOX fuel. This would imply that we use vendor clad surrounding typical MOX fuel pellets or simulated pellets and that we try to model typical commercial reactor temperature gradients. The current design to do this uses simulated MOX rodlets of about 18 inches in length immersed in a melted Lead-Bismuth eutectic bath that is cooled via air flow over steel fins. This design is thus the subject of the following paragraphs.