Steady-state fuel behavior modeling of nitride fuels in FRAPCON-EP

Abstract

Fuel material properties and mechanistic fission gas models in FRAPCON-EP were updated to model the steady-state behavior of high-porosity nitride fuel operating at temperatures below half of the melting point. The fuel thermal conductivity and fuel thermal expansion models were updated with correlations for UN and (U,Pu)N fuels. Hot-pressing of the as-fabricated porosity was modeled as a function of the hydrostatic pressure and creep rate. The solid fission product swelling was assumed to increase linearly with burnup. Fission gas swelling constitutive models were updated to appropriately capture the intragranular gas bubble evolution in nitride fuel. Intergranular gas swelling was neglected due to the assumed high porosity of the fuel. The fission gas release behavior was modeled by fitting the fission gas diffusion coefficient in UN to FRAPCON’s default fission gas release model. This fitted gas diffusion coefficient reflects the effects of porosity, burnup, operating temperature, fission rate, and bubble sink strength. Fission gas release and fuel swelling benchmarks against irradiation data were performed. The updated code was applied to UN fuel in typical PWR geometry and operating conditions, with an extended cycle length of 24months. The results show that swelling of the nitride fuel up to 60MWd/kg burnup did not lead to excessive straining of the cladding. Furthermore, this study showed that a porous (>15% porosity) nitride fuel pellet could achieve a much higher margin to failure from the cladding collapse and grid-to-rod fretting.