Abstract

Accident Tolerant Fuels, also known as Advanced Technology Fuels (ATFs), have the potential to improve the safety and economic performance of commercial nuclear reactors as well as to provide additional operational flexibility for responding to variations in system energy demand.The design, fabrication and in-pile behaviour of currently operating and innovative nuclear fuels to enable a reliable and safe operation of nuclear power plants is a priority for the nuclear industry. The Spanish nuclear professionals (public and private companies, academia, and research centres) have achieved significant advances in this area. Both irradiation programs in commercial reactors, along with experimental and modelling activities, were focused into comprehending and modelling different ATF concepts to understand and predict the behaviour under normal and off-normal conditions.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sub-program “Nuclear Power Reactor Fuel Engineering” is strongly involved in the development and validation of computer codes for ATF fuel design and the valuable Spanish contribution to this sub-program is described in this article.The future Spanish R&D in this field is expected to be focused on further improvements on ATF product development and performance knowledge.

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