Fission induced swelling and creep of U–Mo alloy fuel

Tapering of U–Mo alloy fuel at the end of plates is attributed to lateral mass transfer by fission induced creep, by which fuel mass is relocated away from the fuel end region where fission product induced fuel swelling is in fact the highest. This mechanism permits U–Mo fuel to achieve high burnup by effectively relieving stresses at the fuel end region, where peak stresses are otherwise expected because peak fission product induced fuel swelling occurs there. ABAQUS FEA was employed to examine whether the observed phenomenon can be simulated using physical–mechanical data available in the literature. The simulation results obtained for several plates with different fuel fabrication and loading scheme showed that the measured data were able to be simulated with a reasonable creep rate coefficient. The obtained creep rate constant lies between values for pure uranium and MOX, and is greater than all other ceramic uranium fuels.