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MIT professor develops method to verify compliance with Outer Space Treaty
Danagoulian
Areg Danagoulian of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a mechanism for verifying that Earth-orbiting satellites are in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in space. Danagoulian’s “concept and feasibility study,” titled “Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with cosmic protons,” was published recently in the journal Nature.
R. Austin Freeman, Thomas Martin, Elwyn Roberts, Travis W. Knight (Univ of South Carolina)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 605-611
Uranium Silicide (U3Si2) is being evaluated as a fuel for use in light water reactors as its desirable thermophysical properties suggest an improvement over UO2 with respect to accident tolerance, However, much is still unknown about the in-reactor performance of U3Si2, making an accurate assessment of the fuel challenging. To better understand the behavior of U3Si2 across a wide range of possible environments, high temperature compressive creep testing has been performed on U3Si2 pellets. Using the combination of constant stress and constant temperature testing, a numerical model was developed that can predict both primary and secondary creep rates under a wide range of temperature and stress conditions. This model was implemented in BISON, a coupled multi-physics finite element nuclear fuel performance code, to simulate the performance of U3Si2 under a range of reactor conditions and analyze the effect of creep on fuel behavior from startup through pellet-clad mechanical interaction (PCMI). These models indicate that while thermal and irradiation volumetric effects are dominant during normal operation, under extreme stresses and temperatures creep can become a significant factor. Specifically, under PCMI creep was found to have a noticeable impact on the rate of stress change in the cladding and could extend the lifetime of the cladding by months.