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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Spent fuel recycling and conditioning topic of U.S.-Japan meeting
Officials with the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management discussed spent nuclear fuel recycling and conditioning with counterparts from Japan during the 13th U.S.-Japan Technical Meeting of the Civil Nuclear Energy Research and Development Working Group, held recently in Santa Fe, N.M.
Walter C. Brinkley, Nathan Capps, Brian Wirth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 7 | July 2026 | Pages 1590-1605
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2537478
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The microstructure of a UO2 fuel pellet changes as burnup increases, impacting fuel performance. Predicting and characterizing high burnup structure (HBS) and dark zone formation is a key part of supporting burnup limit extensions for light water reactors. This paper describes a model developed through fitting radially resolved pellet data obtained from recently published microstructural characterization data. The model predicts grain size and grain character, in addition to pore density and size, with fitting dependencies on power history variables. Separately fitting power history variables to microstructural parameters allows for insight into the underlying physical phenomena for future model development. Additionally, experimental data have been correlated to an HBS fraction to facilitate the development of a model capable of predicting a total fuel restructured fraction at the engineering scale. This two-step approach provides a coupling from reactor power history to microstructural data to fractional HBS and creates a basis to model HBS-dependent parameters in a fuel performance code.