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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Nano to begin drilling next week in Illinois
It’s been a good month for Nano Nuclear in the state of Illinois. On October 7, the Office of Governor J.B. Pritzker announced that the company would be awarded $6.8 million from the Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois Act to help fund the development of its new regional research and development facility in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook.
J. M. Beeston, R. R. Hobbins, G. W. Gibson, W. C. Francis*
Nuclear Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | June 1980 | Pages 136-149
Technical Paper | Nuclear Power Reactor Safety / Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A32515
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uranium aluminide powder production, fuel plate fabrication development, and irradiation performance of more than 1700 fuel elements during 10 yr of operational service at Idaho National Engineering Laboratory are discussed. The UAlx dispersion fuel system has performed well in extended service in the high flux test reactors. The anticipated benefits of the powder dispersion form—accommodation of fission products in deliberate voidage, structural tolerance of fission gas, and dispersion of burnable poisons—have been realized. The operating limit for the Advanced Test Reactor fuel elements is presently set at 2.3 × 1021 fiss/cm3 of core—a burnup of >500 000 MWd/MTU. The growth or swelling of uranium aluminide fuel plates at up to 2.4 × 1021 fiss/cm3 is proportional to the fission density, but the proportionality constant depends on the temperature, core porosity, and fuel loading with 93% enriched uranium. For a fuel loading of 4.3 × 1021 U atoms /cm3, the growth corresponds to 0.11% per % burnup. The blister test as a criterion for impending fuel plate failure due to swelling appears adequate, and the blister temperature at fission densities of 2.7 × 1021 fiss/cm3 of core is ∼720 K.
