Atomic scale insights on the microstructure evolution of urania under irradiation

A. Chartier (1) , L. Vanbrutzel (1)

1 CEA-DES (ex-DEN) - CEA-Direction des Energies (ex-Direction de l'Energie Nucléaire)

Urania is commonly used as a fuel in nuclear industry. Urania is heavily irradiated during its in-reactor stay, and faces drastic microstructural modifications, including few percents swelling and increase of dislocation density. Dislocations are identified as perfect dislocations loops and transform with increasing fluence into lines at sufficiently high temperature – i.e. at 600 °C. However, the early stages of their nucleation are hardly attainable experimentally. One commonly infers that their nucleation is related to the aggregation of point defects or defects clusters into dislocations. In the present paper, we clarify the first steps of the effect of irradiation on urania by combining molecular dynamics simulations and experimental investigations.

Domains: Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Nuclear Theory [nucl-th]

A. Chartier, L. Vanbrutzel. Atomic scale insights on the microstructure evolution of urania under irradiation. MMM 2012 - 6th International Conference on Multiscale Materials Modeling, Oct 2016, Dijon, France. ⟨cea-02442352⟩