Production Process, Thermophysical Properties, and Quality Assurance Process for the Provision of Enhanced Accident Tolerant Fuels: ORNL Rodlets for the ATR ATF-1 Experiment.

摘要

The work documented in this report was performed under the Fuel Cycle Research and Development (FCRD) Programs Advanced Fuels Campaign (AFC) FY13 Work Package Number FT-13OR020222, revision 0, Route to production and qualification of FCM fuel - ORNL. The sole milestone in this work package is M2FT-13OR0202221, Report Documenting Production Process, Thermophysical Properties, and QA Process to be Applied to First Irradiation Batch of FCM Fuels, due July 27, 2013. This report satisfies that milestone. As described in Section 1.1 the overall purpose of this document is to provide a bridging Quality Assurance (QA) document internal to the FCRD program enabling the irradiation of test articles of interest to the program. These articles are to be fabricated at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and passed to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for irradiation in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) as part of the Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) development effort designated the ATF-1 Test Series. These test articles include fully ceramic matrix fuel in zirconium alloy clad, as well as other potential fuel-clad systems under development including advanced steel clad and silicon carbide composite clad. The advance steel and SiC test rodlets will each contain commercial UO2 fuel. In each case these irradiation campaigns will represent first-time irradiation for these materials with experimental goals being irradiation stability, both in terms of dimensional stability and thermo-physical properties, as well as fuel-clad interaction. It is anticipated that post-irradiation evaluation will be carried out at hot-cell facilities at both the INL and ORNL with relevant information provided in this and other reports. This document specifically provides a high-level description of these test articles and a more rigorous description on the control and QA processes to be followed during the production of these articles.