Fission gas dynamics test; Development of reactivity-initiated-accident testing technique devoted to investigation of fission gas release kinetics

三原 武  ; 浦野 建太; 宇田川 豊  

Mihara, Takeshi; Urano, Kenta; Udagawa, Yutaka

To promote a better understanding of the fission gas behavior during a reactivity-initiated accident (RIA) and its role in the thermo-mechanical loading in the fuel cladding, the Fission Gas Dynamics (FGD) test program has been developed in the framework of the JAEA and Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) cooperation. The concept of the FGD test is to understand the effect of fission gas release during a RIA test through transient measurement of the pressure inside a rigid chamber, which contains the test fuel, with its minimum deformation against pressure increase. Since the internal pressure sensor of strain gauge (SG) type used in previous RIA-simulated Nuclear Safety Research Reactor (NSRR) tests is strongly affected by gamma and/or neutron field in the NSRR core, we adopted a new pressure sensor using a linear variable differential transducer (LVDT) for accurate pressure measurement with higher stability against pulse irradiation. JAEA has conducted the first NSRR-FGD test (FGD-1) on high-burnup fuel with doped pellets. In advance, difference in pressure response between LVDT-type and SG-type sensors was carefully examined as performance measure of the LVDT-type sensor. The response delay of the LVDT-type sensor compared with the SG-type one was estimated to be about 1.5 ms when the pressure increasing rate exceeded above 20 MPa/s. In the FGD-1 test, the LVDT-type pressure sensor detected a pressure rise of about 100 MPa/s just after the pulse irradiation, which confirmed the capability of this FGD testing technique to study the kinetics of rapid fission gas release during the simulated RIA conditions.