Irradiation Programme of SIC/SIC Fuel Claddings at Halden Reactor

This paper introduces on-going Japanese national projects on "Increased Accident Tolerance of Fuel for LWRs", where SiC/SiC R & D is the key activity including reactor irradiation tasks. MEXT fund based project, named as SCARLET (SiC Fuel Cladding/Assembly Research Launching Extra-Safe Technology) and METI fund based projects, named as INSPIRE (Innovative SiC fuel Pin Research) have been launched as 5 year termed projects at OASIS in Muroran Institute of Technology since 2012. INSPIRE is the irradiation project of SiC/SiC fuel claddings aiming to accumulate material, thermal, irradiation effect data of NITE-SiC/SiC in BWR environment. Nuclear fuel inserted SiC/SiC fuel pins are planned to be installed in Halden reactor. The project includes preparing the NITE- SiC/SiC tubes, joining of end caps, preparation of rigs to control the irradiation environment to BWR condition and the instruments to measure the condition of rigs and pins in operation. Also, basic neutron irradiation data will be accumulated by SiC/SiC coupon samples currently under irradiation in BR2. The output from this project presenting the potentiality of NITE- SiC/SiC fuel cladding with the first stage fuel-cladding interaction will become available within three years. SCARLET irradiation test in HBWR under PWR water condition will be started early 2015 providing the environmental stability of SiC/SiC cladding by continuous DEMO NITE process and joint stability with zircaloy endcaps. (author)