Cladding breaches discovered at two power reactors

摘要

One of the most measurable improvements in power reactor operations in recent years has been in the performance of fuel. Fuel pellets, cladding, and assembly hardware have become so dependable that the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations set an industrywide goal a few years ago of no fuel failures at a reactor in a year. For this reason, it was unusual for two fuel-related problems to be reported within four days. On September 12, Entergy informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that a cask of spent fuel from ANO-1 that was in the drying process was found to be out of specification because of the detection of krypton-85. On September 15, Dominion stated that during a refueling outage at North Anna-2, it was determined that two fuel pins in a removed fuel assembly had split, and an estimated 15 fuel pellets had been dislodged.