General Atomics, Westinghouse, Launch Ceramic Matrix Cladding (for nuclear fuel)
Westinghouse Electric Company on Friday said it was partnering with General Atomics to produce an “accident-tolerant” nuclear reactor fuel that would use a ceramic matrix composite cladding that promises to provide enhanced safety characteristics over the currently established metal cladding.
“The new cladding has an engineered construction that uses silicon carbide (SiC) material reinforced with flexible SiC fiber in much the same way that steel rebar reinforces concrete,” the companies said in a statement.
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Specifically, the CiS cladding allows the fuel rods to hold up under temperatures “well over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit – more than twice what can be sustained by metal cladding used in current reactor cores,” the companies said. The new cladding, moreover, is “much more chemically stable, virtually eliminating the risk of generating potentially explosive hydrogen during loss-of-cooling accidents,” according to the statement.
These attributes answer to long-established fears of a radioactivity released during a loss-of-cooling accident, but also to the incident-specific fears that arose from the Fukushima Daiichi Generating Station accident in March 2011 in which hydrogen build up explosions in reactor buildings greatly contributed to the radioactivity risk associated with that disaster and added multiple levels of difficulty to the cleanup efforts now underway.
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