Post Irradiation Examination for The FUGEN High Burn-up MOX Fuel Assembly (II) Destructive Examination
Ikusawa,Yoshihisa ; Kikuchi, Keiichi ; Ozawa, Takayuki ; Nakazawa, Hiroaki; Abe, Tomoyuki; Isozaki,Takao*; Nagayama, Masahiro*
The "E09" was irradiated in the FUGEN from February 1990 to January 1997, and its average burn-up reached 37.7GWd/t at the end of irradiation. In order to be irradiated up to high burn-up, this fuel assembly had the design improved by applying the fissile content with axial distribution, four UO- GdOfuel rods located with MOX 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 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, Ceramography, Metallography and alpha-autoradiography) were completed in March 2003. The destructive examinations will be completed by December 2004.In this report, the data obtained from destructive examinations completed in March 2003 were summarized, and the evaluation results of irradiation performance of MOX fuel and cladding were discussed. Consequently, the MOX fuel rod integrity during irradiation was confirmed from the result of the destructive PIE. These results will be used for CANDU-OPTION program, which is one of Russian surplus weapon plutonium disposition programs with AECL in Canada, and available for LWR plutonium recycle program in Japan.