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The role of uncertainties in fission gas behavior calculations as part of engineering-scale nuclear fuel modeling is investigated using the BISON fuel performance code with a recently implemented physics based model for fission gas release and swelling. Through the integration of BISON with the DAKOTA software, a sensitivity analysis of the results to selected model parameters is carried out based on UO2 single pellet simulations covering different power regimes. The parameters are varied within ranges representative of the relative uncertainties and consistent with the information in the open literature. The study leads to an initial quantitative assessment of the uncertainty in fission gas behavior predictions with the parameter characterization presently available. Also, the relative importance of the single parameters is evaluated. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is carried out based on simulations of a fuel rod irradiation experiment, pointing out a significant impact of the considered uncertainties on the calculated fission gas release and cladding diametral strain. The results of the study indicate that the commonly accepted deviation between calculated and measured fission gas release by a factor of 2 approximately corresponds to the inherent modeling uncertainty at high fission gas release. Nevertheless, significantly higher deviations may be expected for values around 10% and lower. Implications are discussed in terms of directions of research for the improved modeling of fission gas behavior for engineering purposes

Accurately predicting changes in the thermal conductivity of light water reactor UO 2 fuel throughout its lifetime in reactor is an essential part of fuel performance modeling. However, typical thermal conductivity models from the literature are empirical. In this work, we begin to develop a mechanistic thermal conductivity model by focusing on the impact of gaseous fission products, which is coupled to swelling and fission gas release. The impact of additional defects and fission products will be added in future work. The model is developed using a combination of atomistic and mesoscale simulation, as well as analytical models. The impact of dispersed fission gas atoms is quantified using molecular dynamics simulations corrected to account for phonon-spin scattering. The impact of intragranular bubbles is accounted for using an analytical model that considers phonon scattering. The impact of grain boundary bubbles is determined using a simple model with five thermal resistors that are parameterized by comparing to 3D mesoscale heat conduction results. However, when used in the BISON fuel performance code to model four reactor experiments, it produces reasonable predictions without having been fit to fuel thermocouple data.

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BISON is a nuclear fuel performance application built using the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) finite element library. One of its major goals is to have a great amount of flexibility in how it is used, including in the types of fuel it can analyze, the geometry of the fuel being modeled, the modeling approach employed, and the dimensionality and size of the models. Fuel forms that can be modeled include standard light water reactor fuel, emerging light water reactor fuels, tri-structural isotropic fuel particles, and metallic fuels. BISON is a platform for research in nuclear fuel performance modeling while simultaneously serving as a tool for the analysis of nuclear fuel designs. Recent research in BISON includes techniques such as the extended finite element method for fuel cracking, exploration of high-burnup light water reactor fuel behavior, swelling behavior of metallic fuels, and central void formation in mixed-oxide fuel. BISON includes integrated documentation for each of its capabilities, follows rigorous software quality assurance procedures, and has a growing set of rigorous verification and validation tests.

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