French nuclear company Framatome is running five test programmes for accident-tolerant fuel in the US and Europe and is confident that it will “only be a few years” before it is producing full reload quantities, Ala Alzaben, senior vice-president for the firm’s North America fuel business unit and commercial and customer centre told NucNet.
Last year, during a scheduled spring refuelling outage, Framatome deployed the world’s first full ATF assembly at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear station in the US state of Maryland.
This followed the launching in 2012 of the US Department of Energy ATF initiative in response to the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan. The DOE set three main objectives: to develop a fuel to allow nuclear operators additional coping time during accidents; to launch and deploy lead test assemblies by 2022; and to make sure improvements do not impact the operational performance of the fuel.
…