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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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NNSA furloughs 1,400 employees, pays contractors until end of month
After nearly three weeks of a government shutdown, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has furloughed 1,400 employees and has retained 400 as essential employees who will continue working without pay.
David Halabuk, Tomas Navrat
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 69-81
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1373518
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a thermomechanical assessment of various types of fuel cladding during a reactivity-initiated accident (RIA) which is simulated by the finite element analysis program ANSYS. Four cladding concepts are analyzed; one concept considers currently used zirconium alloy and three concepts consider silicon carbide (SiC) material. The SiC claddings consist either of composite material or of a two-layered structure formed of SiC composite and monolithic SiC. Each cladding is analyzed for two states of nuclear fuel: fresh and high burnup. A gap that exists between fuel pellets and cladding in fresh state is either reduced or removed in a high burnup state. It was shown that zirconium cladding resists RIA conditions very well in fresh state, however, in high burnup state significant stress and plastic strain occur. The SiC cladding was shown to have many advantages over zirconium alloy. Nevertheless, its lower strength appears to be critical in RIA conditions when cladding needs to withstand exceeding loading after the fuel-cladding gap disappears due to the expansion of the fuel pellet.