Abstract
The U.S. Department of Energy is considering a new nuclear fuel, which should be much more impervious during a loss of coolant accident. The fuel would consist of tristructural isotropic coated particles with dense uranium nitride (UN) kernels. The objectives of this effort are to make uranium oxide microspheres with adequately dispersed carbon nanoparticles and to convert these microspheres into UN kernels. Recent improvements to internal gelation process were successfully applied to the production of uranium gel spheres with different concentrations of carbon black. After the spheres were washed, a simple, two-step heat profile was used to produce kernels with a chemical composition of UC0.07−0.10N0.90−0.93. The first step involved heating the microspheres to 2023 K in a vacuum, and in the second step, the microspheres were held at 1873 K for 6 hrs in nitrogen.
