Performance of refractory alloy-clad fuel pins

This paper discusses objectives and basic design of two fuel-cladding tests being conducted in support of SP-100 technology development. Two of the current space nuclear power concepts use conventional pin type designs, where a coolant removes the heat from the core and transports it to an out-of-core energy conversion system. An extensive irradiation testing program was conducted in the 1950's and 1960's to develop fuel pins for space nuclear reactors. The program emphasized refractory metal clad uranium nitride (UN), uranium carbide (UC), uranium oxide (UO2), and metal matrix fuels (UCZr and BeO-UO2). Based on this earlier work, studies presented here show that UN and UO2 fuels in conjunction with several refractory metal cladding materials demonstrated high potential for meeting space reactor requirements and that UC could serve as an alternative but higher risk fuel