Fission uranium fuu full#
Fission uranium fuu license#

ART sponsors collaborative efforts with universities and industry partners to accelerate research on various advanced reactor designs.Kelowna, British Columbia-(Newsfile Corp. TRISO fuel research is supported through the Office of Nuclear Energy’s Advanced Reactor Technologies (ART) program. The project would ultimately use high assay low enriched uranium to produce the TRISO fuel pellets and pebbles for future high-temperature gas and molten salt reactors.

Fission uranium fuu license#

Some reactor vendors such as X-energy and Kairos Power, along with the Department of Defense, are planning to use TRISO fuel for their designs-including some small modular and micro-reactor concepts.ĭOE is also supporting X-energy’s efforts to design and submit a NRC license application for a new fabrication facility. TRISO fuel testing is gaining a lot of interest from the advanced reactor community. Future test results will be submitted to the NRC for licensing TRISO fuel and reactor vendors. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for official review. With support from DOE, the Electric Power Research Institute worked with INL and industry stakeholders to submit a licensing topical report to the U.S.

Fission uranium fuu full#

These tests exceeded the predicted worst-case accident conditions for high-temperature gas reactors and showed no to minimal damage of the particles with full fission product retention.Ĭontinued TRISO fuel qualification testing is currently underway at INL. The irradiated fuel was then exposed to more than 300 hours of testing at temperatures up to 1800° Celsius (more than 3,000° Fahrenheit). This is nearly double the previous mark set by the Germans in the 1980s and is three times the burnup that current light-water fuels can achieve-demonstrating its long-life capability. In 2009, this improved TRISO fuel set an international record by achieving a 19% maximum burnup during a three-year test at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). In 2002, the Department of Energy (DOE) focused on improving TRISO fuel using uranium oxycarbide fuel kernels and enhancing its irradiation performance and manufacturing methods in order to further develop advanced high-temperature gas reactors. TRISO fuel was first developed in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1960s with uranium dioxide fuel. Simply put, TRISO particles cannot melt in a reactor and can withstand extreme temperatures that are well beyond the threshold of current nuclear fuels. This allows them to retain fission products under all reactor conditions. TRISO fuels are structurally more resistant to neutron irradiation, corrosion, oxidation and high temperatures (the factors that most impact fuel performance) than traditional reactor fuels.Įach particle acts as its own containment system thanks to its triple-coated layers. They can be fabricated into cylindrical pellets or billiard ball-sized spheres called “pebbles” for use in either high temperature gas or molten salt-cooled reactors. The particles are incredibly small (about the size of a poppy seed) and very robust. The kernel is encapsulated by three layers of carbon- and ceramic-based materials that prevent the release of radioactive fission products. TRISO stands for TRi-structural ISOtropic particle fuel.Įach TRISO particle is made up of a uranium, carbon and oxygen fuel kernel. Some of them will require a new fuel that’s tough enough handle the higher operating temperatures of these advanced reactors.Įnter TRISO fuel-the most robust nuclear fuel on earth. More than 70 projects are underway in the United States with new designs that are expected to be more economical to build and operate. These technologies are going to completely change the way we think about nuclear reactors. There’s a lot of buzz around advanced nuclear.