If the fuel rods are no longer being cooled — as has happened at all three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant operating at the time of the earthquake — then the zirconium cladding will swell and crack, releasing
the uranium fuel pellets and fission byproducts, such as radioactive cesium and iodine, among others.
Not exact matches
The 3.7 - meter - long nuclear
fuel used at Fukushima is composed of
uranium oxide
pellets encased in a zirconium cladding.
The
fuel rods in most cases consist of
uranium dioxide
pellets encased in zirconium alloy tubes or cladding.
That is also enough to meet almost half the
fuel needs of the 104 U.S. reactors, once various plants located throughout the country shape this
uranium into half - inch -(1.27 - centimeter --RRB- diameter black
pellets and then form them into rods by coating the
pellets with zirconium cladding.
Nuclear
fuel rods are made of hundreds of small
pellets of enriched
uranium placed end - to - end inside hollow tubes of zircaloy that are about a half - inch across.
Rather than the
pellets of
uranium oxide used in other fast reactors and conventional reactors as
fuel, GE would fabricate metal alloy
fuels, with the plutonium or
uranium mixed with zirconium metal.
• Ceramic process in which
uranium oxide powder is used to manufacture
pellets; these
pellets are inserted into zirconium alloy tubes which, once they are loaded, pressurized and sealed, are called
fuel rods.
A: The way the
fuel cycle is done now is: you mine
uranium; you purify the metal; you convert it to oxide; you put it in a reactor in the form of
pellets; it stays in there for about three years; you take it out, and you try to find someplace to put it.
The used
fuel pellets from current reactors (after processing to convert the
uranium oxide to
uranium tetrafluoride) could just be dumped in the molten salt.