Irradiation Planning for Fully-Ceramic Micro-encsapsulated fuel in ATR at LWR-relevant conditions: year-end report on FY-2011

agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, expressed or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness, of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. References herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trade mark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the U.S. Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the U.S. Government or any agency thereof. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge Dr. Charles A. Wemple of Studsvik-ScandPower for his instrumental help in the computation of dpa values. SUMMARY Heretofore, the principal focus of the Deep Burn Project was to plan, carry out, and evaluate the process of once-through burning of plutonium (Pu) and minor actinides (MA), i.e., residual transuranics (TRU) from used fuel in a reactor. First, transmutation or fissioning, collectively termed burning, in a high temperature reactor (HTR) was considered. This included evaluating both the pebble bed and the prismatic block HTR as a platform for deep burning of the plutonium and minor actinides. In the second half of FY-2011, the Idaho National Laboratory, along with the other project participants, started evaluating the possible use of existing, current generation, light water reactors (LWRs) as the platform for deployment of the Deep Burn concept. Therefore, starting in March 2011, the INL has been evaluating the neutronic design and feasibility of the Deep Burn concept in a LWR. This application would use a new type of fuel. The new fuel form, termed " Fully-Ceramic Micro-encapsulated " (FCM) fuel, is a concept that borrows the tri-isotropic (TRISO) fuel particle design from high-temperature reactor technology. In the Deep Burn LWR (DB-LWR) concept, these fuel particles are pressed into compacts using silicon carbide (SiC) for matrix material and are loaded into fuel pins for use in conventional LWRs. The TRU loading comes from the spent fuel of a conventional LWR after 5 years of cooling. In conjunction with designing the fuel and evaluating its neutronic performance, the INL has also been evaluating the material performance of the fuel using modeling as the means of such an evaluation. These two activities are reported upon in two companion reports [B. Boer, et. al., FCR&D-2011-000338 …