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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
Joshua Stone, Hangbok Choi, Robert W. Schleicher (General Atomics)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 685-693
Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF) are being developed f to replace current zircaloy clad fuels in light water reactors (LWRs) to improve both safety and economic performance. As part of this effort, General Atomics (GA) is developing silicon carbide fiber – silicon carbide matrix composite (SiC-SiC) cladding to provide larger safety margins, high burnup capability, longer cycle lengths and uprated operation. In order to quantify the advantage of SiC-SiC over zircaloy, GA has modified the transient fuel performance code, FRAPTRAN, for modeling SiC-SiC-based cladding using public and private SiC property data and GA-developed failure models. The present work compares the performance of SiC-SiC verses zircaloy cladding around UO2 fuel for transients which can lead to damage of the fuel cladding. The transient cases selected are French CABRI reactor tests for Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) fuel at hot coolant conditions, Japanese NSRR tests at cold coolant conditions, Halden IFA-650 and Power Burst Facility (PBF) LOC-11C. Results show the SiC-SiC cladding offers comparable or superior performance to zircaloy for the cases analyzed.