About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
2026 TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition
|
| Symposium
|
Metallic Fuels - Design, Fabrication, and Characterization
|
| Presentation Title |
Comparison of FAST and Historical Irradiation Testing of U-Zr Fuels |
| Author(s) |
Geoffrey L. Beausoleil, Tiankai Yao, Yachun Wang, Nicole Rodriguez Perez, Maria Okuniewski, Jake Hirschhorn, Ryan Sweet, Alex Swearingen, Colby Jensen |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Geoffrey L. Beausoleil |
| Abstract Scope |
The Advanced Fuels Campaign has been performing accelerated testing of metal fuels for several years using the Fission Accelerated Steady-state Testing (FAST) platform. The tests have investigated innovative metal fuel designs including fuel liners, fuel additives, and sodium free annular fuel. However, control rodlets based on designs from previous metallic fuel tests irradiated in the EBR-II and FFTF sodium fast reactors are a crucial component of the test matrix to establish baseline impacts of geometric and fission rate scaling used in the FAST approach. This presentation provides a summary update on the first FAST experiments and a comparison to past metal fuel experiments. These comparisons include cladding profilometry, metallography, and electron microscopy analyses and are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of this scaled irradiation test design, as well as the potential limitations for certain performance behaviors. Lastly, an outlook on future DOE programmatic research on metal fuels is provided. |
| Proceedings Inclusion? |
Planned: |
| Keywords |
Nuclear Materials, Other, |