Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US state of Tennessee will examine several Westinghouse advanced nuclear fuel test rods that were irradiated in a commercial reactor as part of its efforts to support licensing the fuel with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The accident tolerant fuel is being developed by Westinghouse through the US Department of Energy’s accident tolerant fuel programme. The industry-led effort is looking to commercialise new fuels within the decade to help improve the performance and economics of US reactors.
Westinghouse loaded the fuel into a US commercial reactor in the spring of 2019. The lead test rods were removed during an autumn 2020 refuelling outage and shipped to ORNL in June.
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