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This page describes how uranium dioxide nuclear fuel behaves during both normal nuclear reactor operation and under reactor accident conditions, such as overheating. Work in this area is often very expensive to conduct, and so has often been performed on a collaborative basis between groups of countries, usually under the aegis of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's ...
Nuclear fuel process A graph comparing nucleon number against binding energy Close-up of a replica of the core of the research reactor at the Institut Laue-Langevin. Nuclear fuel refers to any substance, typically fissile material, which is used by nuclear power stations or other nuclear devices to generate energy.
As the fuel expands on heating, the core of the pellet expands more than the rim which may lead to cracking. Because of the thermal stress thus formed the fuel cracks, the cracks tend to go from the centre to the edge in a star shaped pattern. In order to better understand and control these changes in materials, these behaviors are studied.
A fuel element failure is a rupture in a nuclear reactor's fuel cladding that allows the nuclear fuel or fission products, either in the form of dissolved radioisotopes or hot particles, to enter the reactor coolant or storage water. [1] The de facto standard nuclear fuel is uranium dioxide or a mixed uranium/plutonium dioxide.
Criticality accidents are divided into one of two categories: Process accidents, where controls in place to prevent any criticality are breached;; Reactor accidents, which occur due to operator errors or other unintended events (e.g., during maintenance or fuel loading) in locations intended to achieve or approach criticality, such as nuclear power plants, nuclear reactors, and nuclear ...
Nuclear chemistry is the sub-field of chemistry dealing with radioactivity, nuclear processes, and transformations in the nuclei of atoms, such as nuclear transmutation and nuclear properties. It is the chemistry of radioactive elements such as the actinides , radium and radon together with the chemistry associated with equipment (such as ...
The spent fuel pool is a large pool of water that provides cooling and shielding of the spent nuclear fuel as well as limit radiation exposure to on-site personnel. Once the energy has decayed somewhat (approximately five years), the fuel can be transferred from the fuel pool to dry shielded casks, that can be safely stored for thousands of years.
Nuclear reprocessing is useful economically because chemical separation is much simpler to accomplish than the difficult isotope separation required to prepare nuclear fuel from natural uranium ore, so that in principle chemical separation yields more generated energy for less effort than mining, purifying, and isotopically separating new ...