WANG Lixiao, BAI Bin, XU Chen
(Institute of Material, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Jiangyou 621700, Sichuan, China)
Abstract: Uranium dioxide is the most widely used nuclear fuel at present, but the low thermal conductivity of traditional fuel could result in possible serious accident. The concept of accident tolerant fuel (ATF) was proposed after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Due to the large-scale utilization of uranium dioxide-based nuclear fuels, it is urgent to increase thermal conductivity of the currently used pellets, by increasing the grain size or introducing second phases. However, there are still various problems and shortcomings when using the conventional methods to prepare doped uranium dioxide pellets. With the development of field-assisted sintering technology in the last years, it has been widely employed to prepare uranium dioxide-based composite pellets. Meanwhile, significant progress has been made in various composite fuel pellets, such as UO2-SiC. The paper offers an overview of the progress in this research topic.
Key words: field-assisted sintering; uranium dioxide; nuclear fuel; accident tolerant fuel