NPRE’s Nuclear Materials Group shares in a $4.5-million Department of Energy grant to research the aging of stored, used nuclear fuel. Prof. Brent Heuser and Department Head Jim Stubbins, will receive about $720,000 over three years for NPRE’s part in the project. The funds will support the study of used fuel cladding and canister properties for long-term dry storage.
With Texas A&M University leading the project, other participating institutions are Boise State University, North Carolina State Univeristy, the University of Florida, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Savannah River National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The DOE’s Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) is funding the project.
NEUP also has awarded Stubbins $125,000 to update materials testing equipment to study the aging of nuclear fuel cladding under extreme environmental conditions.
In other news, NPRE’s materials group were the first researchers to use Idaho National Laboratory’s new “rabbit” facility with an experiment conducted in September.
The facility offers a pneumatic tube researchers can use to shoot specimens into the INL’s reactor to irradiate the specimens. That way, the reactor doesn’t need to be shut down to load specimens.
The NPRE group, including PhD student Carolyn Tomchik, were irraditing steel to determine how it would perform in a reactor.
The INL facility, a hydraulic shuttle system, has been nicknamed the “rabbit.” The “rabbit” samples are a part of a much bigger matrix of experimental conditions to examine radiation effects in some model steels, some commercially available steels which are currently designated for use in advance reactor systems, and some developmental steels. The choice of steels is coordinated with several other irradiation campaigns including high dose experiments in the French fast reactor, Phenix, before it was shut down.