ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Aart Van Der Linde, Jacques H. N. Verheugen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | October 1982 | Pages 70-77
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel | doi.org/10.13182/NT82-A33053
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two irradiation tests were conducted in the pressurized water reactor loop of the High Flux Reactor at Petten to compare the low burnup (0.4% fima), high power (35 to 60 kW·m−1) performance of MO2 sphere-pac fuel with the plutonium incorporated only in the large (1000-µm) diameter spheres and that of homogeneously enriched UO2 sphere-pac and pellet fuel The fuel columns in the Zircaloy-4 clad pins were fabricated with a smear density of 87 to 88% of the theoretical UO2 density. Postirradiation examinations showed that fission gas release, axial migration of cesium, and relocation of small (10- to 40-µm) and medium (∼100-µm) diameter spheres were considerably larger in the MO2 sphere-pac pins than in the UO2 sphere-pac pins. Contrary to observations in the pellet pins, no hard mechanical fuel-cladding interaction has been observed in the sphere-pac pins. Although these tests showed the technical feasibility of the inhomogeneous MO2 sphere-pac fuel pin, its further development seems appropriate only in connection with the use of recycle light water reactor fuel.
