The Applicability of SiC-SiC fuel cladding to conventional PWR power plant

Furumoto, Kenichiro*; Watanabe, Seiichi*; Yamamoto, Teruhisa*; Teshima, Hideyuki*; Yamashita, Shinichiro   ; Saito, Hiroaki; Shirasu, Noriko  

Since 2015, Mitsubishi Nuclear Fuel (MNF) has joined in a Japanese R&D project of ATF founded by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) as a subcontractor to Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) which is the prime contractor to METI. In this program, MNF plans to evaluate an influence of Silicon Carbide (SiC) composite cladding upon fuel rod behavior in current pressurized water reactors (PWR). This paper reports the evaluation result of the applicability of fuel rod with SiC composite cladding for a conventional PWR. For the applicability evaluations of SiC composite to conventional PWR, both of analytical evaluations and out-of-pile tests for SiC composite were conducted. Analytical evaluations were performed by Mitsubishi's own fuel rod design code and the fuel rod behavior evaluation code developed by JAEA. These codes were modified to evaluate the behavior of the fuel rod with SiC composite cladding. As out-of-pile tests, thermal diffusivity measurement and autoclave corrosion test for SiC composite samples were performed. Test apparatus were developed for evaluation of performance of SiC composite under the condition simulated design basis accident (DBA).