ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Launching into tomorrow: NRIC guides new era of research and deployment
In June 2025, the Department of Energy announced the Reactor Pilot Program, an authorization pathway that allowed reactor developers to partner with the DOE to get first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors built and tested. Soon after, the DOE rolled out a complementary Fuel Line Pilot Program, which aimed to fast-track fuel projects. In all, 20 projects were accepted into the new programs.
A. R. Wazzan, A. Villalobos, D. Okrent
Nuclear Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August 1985 | Pages 285-289
Technical Note | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33654
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A computer code developed earlier by Villalobos et al. to predict fission gas behavior in uranium oxide fuel under steady-state irradiation conditions and where bubble gas resolution is represented with the single knock-on model (SKO) is modified to replace the SKO model with the complete bubble destruction model (CBD). The CBD model required that bubble nucleation be included in the present analysis. The revised code is used to compute gas release and total swelling. Both are found to be insensitive to whether they are obtained with the CBD or the SKO option. This is mainly because at low atomic percent of burnup, total swelling is dominated by the grain-edge bubble gas contribution, and release is dependent on the formation of a complete grainface/grain-edge tunnel network—factors that are not much affected by either the SKO or CBD models. At higher atomic percent of burnup, intragranular swelling, which can be sensitive to the resolution model, contributes more to swelling. But even then, computations at 1.0 at.% burnup suggest total swelling will continue to be dominated by grain-edge gas. These results suggest that in modeling swelling and release in irradiated uranium dioxide fuel, the simpler SKO resolution model is satisfactory.