Advanced reactor designs offer many advantages over typical Light Water Reactors (LWRs) including fast neutron capability, passive safety features, and improved performance. While the future for these reactors seems promising, operating and test experience is necessary to further validate such claims. The development of full-scale facilities has proved to be...
Vibration of nuclear power plant components can cause fretting wear and fatigue that can eventually lead to component failure. Flexible, high-aspect ratio components under flow, such as the wire-wrapped cylindrical fuel elements in a liquid metal-cooled fast reactor (LMFR) core, are particularly susceptible to vibration due to their low natural...
The metastable isotope of technetium-99 (Tc-99m) is an important diagnostic tool used in the field of nuclear medicine due to the isotope's 6.0 hour half-life, 140.5 keV γ-decay mechanism, and multiple oxidation states [1,2]. Approximately 70% of the world’s nuclear medicine procedures involve the use of Tc-99m [3]. The conventional...
Current research on the topic of advanced reactor fuel types include the use of ultrahigh density Uranium-Molybdenum fuels, towards their use in high-performance research reactors. These reactors operate with high power densities, and the increased cooling requirements therefore place high relevance on the fluid-structure interaction with these fuel elements; therefore...
Mechanical vibrations compromise the integrity of key components of thermal power plants. Without careful design, strong resonances during steady state operation can wear these components to the point of failure, leading to an unsafe situation that may force a plant to shut down. The purpose of this research is to...
Currently there is a great amount of interest in the phenomena of natural circulation as a cooling mechanism for normal operation as well as emergency conditions in nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools. In order to better understand this phenomena for the specific geometry of vertical, heated rods in water,...
Most operating power reactors use oxide fuel in the form of uranium oxide (UO2) which is robust against high temperatures but suffers from poor mechanical performance at high levels of burnup. Currently, the maximum average burnup in light water reactors in the US is 62.5 GWd/t, which is partially imposed...
The Transient Reactor Test facility (TREAT) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is a unique reactor capable of stressing test fuel during a power pulse transient. TREAT fuel is composed of high enriched uranium (HEU) heterogeneous fuel; microscopic UO₂ fuel grains with an average radius of 10 μm are randomly distributed...
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are a recent advancement in commercial nuclear reactor design with growing interest worldwide. New SMR concepts, such as the Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor (MASLWR), must undergo a licensing processes established by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) prior to commercial operation. Given the lack of...
Vibration of nuclear fuel rods is an area of significance for the long-term safe operation of any nuclear power plant. One mechanism of vibration, flow induced vibration (FIV), must be quantified when designing a new core, such as a sodium fast reactor which employs helically-wrapped wire spacers. Experimental work undertaken...
The reactivity-initiated accident (RIA) accident has stirred wide interest for the need of designing advanced and high tolerance fuels for next generation nuclear power plants. For pressurized water reactors (PWRs), the accidentally induced reactivity pulse adds transient energy input to the fuel. As a result, boiling may happen locally. Boiling...
Vortex shedding is a phenomenon relevant to any industry dealing with fluid flow. The shed vortices often produce oscillatory forces, which have been suspect in the catastrophic failure of airplanes and bridges alike. To prevent further engineering failures a better understanding of the underlying physics is needed. It has been...
In recent years, the global nuclear industry has placed a greater emphasis on passively safe reactor designs. In particular, much attention and design work has been applied to engineered systems for passive cooling of nuclear fuel, whether it be loaded in a core or stored in spent fuel pools. The...