Hydride Precipitation Crack Propagation in Zircaloy Cladding During a Decreasing Temperature History

摘要

An assessment of safety, design, and cost tradeoff issues for short (ten to fifty years) and longer (fifty to hundreds of years) interim dry storage of spent nuclear fuel in Zircaloy rods shall address potential failures of the Zircaloy cladding caused by the precipitation response of zirconium hydride platelets. If such assessment analyses are to be done rigorously, they will be necessarily complex because the precipitation response of zirconium hydride platelets is a stochastic functional of hydrogen concentration, temperature, stress, fabrication defect/texture structures, and flaw sizes of the cladding. Thus, there are, and probably always will be, zirhydride questions to analytically and experimentally resolve concerning the consistency, the completeness, and the certainty of models, data, the initial and the time-dependent boundary conditions. Some resolution of these questions will be required in order to have a defensible preference and tradeoffs decision analysis for assessing risks and consequences of the potential zirhydride induced cladding failures during dry storage time intervals. In the following brief discussion, one of these questions is posed as a consequence of an anomaly described in data reproducibility that was reported in the results of tests for hydrogen induced delayed cracking.