A great effort has been made to develop an experimental apparatus by optical method to observe phenomena of nuclear fuel failure in a water environment in actual in-reactor experiments. There are many difficulties to be overcome, such as high radiation fluence, limited space, shock pressure generation, fission products release. It was extracted through irradiation tests of glasses, fibers and films that non-browning glass used periscope should be recommended as, an image guide, and light is hardly guided effectively from outside source into a capsule by optical fibers or a periscope. On the other hand, ex-reactor simulation tests were successfully carried out to record photographically the transient behaviour on the surface of a heated rod by a high speed camera through a periscope with a lamp immersed directly into water in a capsule. Based on the results of these tests, an experimental apparatus for in-reactor tests was designed to observe transient behaviour of a fuel rod including fuel failure and subsequent phenomena.

Date Published: 27 July 1979
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 0189, 13th Intl Congress on High Speed Photography and Photonics, (27 July 1979); doi: 10.1117/12.957685

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0189:
13th Intl Congress on High Speed Photography and Photonics
Shin-Ichi Hyodo, Editor(s)