Nuclear Fuel Modelling and Perspectives on Canadian Efforts in Fuel Development

This chapter discusses how computational efforts span the entire multi‐scale multi‐physics spectrum, ranging from atomistic electronic structure and classical inter‐atomic potential calculations, to meso‐scale simulations of micro‐structural evolution, to continuum scale thermo‐mechanical simulations of fuel performance. A variety of scientific disciplines must be understood in regards to nuclear fuel behavior, including heat transfer, structural and fracture mechanics, thermodynamics, materials science, and reactor physics. A great difficulty in capturing the interdependencies of the foregoing mechanisms is that it is impossible to reproduce the conditions inside of a nuclear reactor in the laboratory. Canadian interests in nuclear fuel research and development have been mainly focused on uranium dioxide ceramic fuels, which are used in CANDU nuclear generating stations, and to a lesser extent in metallic dispersion fuels, which are used in research and test reactors.