Fuel testing in the power burst facility: a review of methods

This document presents a description of the Power Burst Facility (PBF) at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and briefly describes a number of experimental methods and designs of test trains used in past programs and planned for new programs to study the behavior of light water reactor fuel under conditions ranging from normal to severe accident. The PBF is a thermal reactor with a central 28-cm-diameter, 0.914-m-long through-hole flux-trap for testing purposes. Steady state and transient neutron flux capabilities are described. The reactor has been used in studies of severe fuel damage, operational transients, pellet-cladding interaction, power-cooling-mismatch (burnout and vapor blanketing), loss-of-coolant accident, and extremely fast transients representing reactivity initiated accidents. Test trains developed for these programs range from single-, four-, and nine-rod assemblies, up to the current 32-rod bundles being used for severe fuel damage tests. Test trains and typical instruments are described, as are new test trains and instruments capable of operating near the melting point of UO2 (3130 K)