Safer fuel and cladding for future nuclear reactor

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Recent tragic accident in Fukushima clearly demonstrates urgency of the design of safer nuclear fuel. The safety of uranium based reactors can be improved if thermal conductivity of the fuel is increased; this would lower the fuel temperature, prevent melting of the reactor core and the failure of fuel cladding. Higher thermal conductivity would also lower thermal stresses, prevent fuel cracking and increase its longevity. Generation IV reactors like Supercritical Water Cooled (SWC) Candu reactor, will have higher thermal efficiency and will be operating at higher temperatures and pressures and therefore development of novel materials for fuel cladding is critical. Our work will be focused on manufacturing novel high thermal conductivity composite fuel with spark plasma sintering, and testing materials for cladding that can operate at high temperatures. Combined experimental investigations and predictive simulations would allow us to make recommendations for nuclear materials for safer operation of SWR nuclear reactors. Safety of energy production can be significantly improved when thorium reactors are build. There are however several important material-related problems that have to be solved. Candu Energy Inc., designer of thorium based Candu reactor, identified for us what physical and mechanical properties of thorium fuel at high temperature are not well known, and these properties are required for their design. We plan applying state of the art, first principle (predictive) modelling to obtain necessary data. New experimental techniques will be used, for the first time, to analyse structure and measure thermal characteristics at large range of temperatures, up to 2800°C. The dependence of thermal, and selected mechanical properties on microstructure will be studied in details. Our comprehensive approach, combining ab-initio simulation with innovative experiments, will contribute to development of accident tolerant fuel and safer fuel cladding systems of future Candu reactors.