Post Irradiation Examination for The FUGEN High Burn-up MOX Fuel Assembly (II) Destructive Examination (Part 1)

Ikusawa,Yoshihisa   ; Kikuchi, Keiichi ; Nakazawa, Hiroaki; Abe, Tomoyuki; Isozaki,Takao*; Nagayama, Masahiro*

The FUGEN High Burn-up MOX Fuel Assembly E09 was developed for high burn-up fuel of DATR. The E09 MOX fuel assembly was irradiated at the FUGEN from February 1990 to January 1997, and its average burn-up reached 37.7GWd/t. In order to be irradiated up to high burn-up, they had the design improved by applying the fissile content with axial distribution, four UO2-Gd2O3 fuel rods and so on. The E09 fuel assembly had been cooled in the FUGEN spent fuel pool for four years after irradiation. After that, it was transported to Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) Tokai Research Establishment in 2001. Post Irradiation Examinations (PIE) were started in July 2001 at Reactor Fuel Examination Facility in JAERI, and a part of destructive examinations(Puncture examination ,Metallography and Alpha Autoradiography) were completed in March 2003. In this report, the data from destructive examinations will be summarized, and evaluation results of irradiation performance will be discussed. The integrity of fuel assembly during irradiation was confirmed in the destructive PIE.