Seawater effects on the soundness of spent fuel cladding tube

Motooka, Takafumi; Ueno, Fumiyoshi  ; Yamamoto, Masahiro 

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, seawater was injected into spent fuel pools of Unit 2-4 for the emergency cooling. Seawater might cause localized corrosion of spent fuel cladding. This would lead to leakage of not only fissile materials but also fission products from fuel cladding. The behavior, however, is not understood well. In this paper, the effects of seawater on corrosion behavior and mechanical property of were studied by using a spent fuel cladding from a BWR. We immersed the spent cladding tubes in diluted artificial seawater for 300h at 353 K, and conducted their visual, cross-sectional and strength examinations. As a localized corrosion index, the pitting potentials of specimens fabricated from the cladding were measured as functions of chloride ion concentration ranging from 20 to 2500 ppm. The visual examination showed that localized corrosion has not occurred, and cross-sectional examination showed no cracks. The strength of immersed tubes was comparable to that of non-immersed tubes. Additionally, pitting potential could not be measured over 1.0 V; pitting corrosion was hardly occurred. These results suggested that the specimens from the spent fuel cladding tube was very resistant to localized corrosion.