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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Yang-Hyun Koo, Byung-Ho Lee, Jae-Yong Oh, Kun-Woo Song
Nuclear Technology | Volume 164 | Number 3 | December 2008 | Pages 337-347
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A4031
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Based on the high-burnup fuel data available in open literature, a conservative width of high-burnup structure (HBS) in light water reactor UO2 fuel, which can be used for fuel performance and accident analysis or assessment of spent fuel under geological disposal conditions, is proposed as a function of pellet average burnup. For pellet average burnup of 30 to 60 GWd/t U, where the HBS generally increases with burnup because of the accumulation of irradiation damage, a conservative HBS width is given by wHBS = 13.3 (buavg - 30), where wHBS is the HBS width in m and buavg is the pellet average burnup in GWd/t U. For pellet average burnup of 60 to 75 GWd/t U, where microstructural damage caused by irradiation is partly annealed, a conservative HBS width is expressed by wHBS = 2.02 exp(buavg /11.35). In the case of pellet average burnup above 75 GWd/t U up to at least 100 GWd/t U, the HBS width does not exceed some limiting value of 1.5 mm because high temperature in the central region of the fuel pellet has caused an extensive annealing of irradiation damage. In addition, because of significant fission gas release during irradiation up to high burnup, HBS formation might not have expanded to the pellet region whose temperature was lower than the threshold one. Therefore, for this burnup range, a conservative HBS width is given as wHBS = 1500 m.