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Heavy-element chemistry

The quest for safer nuclear fuels

Nature Reviews Chemistry (2024)Cite this article

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To increase the safety and performance of nuclear reactors, researchers are working on developing ‘accident tolerant’ fuels. Ideally, these fuel pellets will be less susceptible to swelling and be more resistant to extreme heat. This led chemists to develop uranium dioxide (UO2) doped with divalent elements, E2+. These dopants can introduce vacancies into the lattice that lead to larger grain sizes, which create longer pathways for fission gasses to migrate out of the grains. In undoped fuel, fission gas build-up at grain boundaries causes the fuel pellet to swell. Therefore, having larger grains that slow fission gas migration into grain boundaries is highly desired. Divalent Cr2+ ions are a commonly explored dopant for UO2 fuels. These materials have larger grain sizes while maintaining the dissolution kinetics of undoped UO2, making their long-term storage and disposal paths similarly safe. Atomistic models have suggested that Mn2+ is a conceivable alternative doping material, with the potential to increase the sizes of grains even more than Cr2+ dopants. As such, experimental studies are required to understand the physical chemistry and reactivity of these potential fuels.

Both the calcinated and sintered materials were analysed using Mn K-edge extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) analysis and a distorted cubic environment of the Mn was found in both materials. Mn K-edge X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) showed that all of the Mn was divalent (Mn2+) akin to Cr2+-doped-UO2.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of DOE, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division, Heavy Element Chemistry Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) under contract DE-AC02-05CH11231.

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  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Chemical Sciences Division, Berkeley, CA, USA

    S. Olivia Gunther & Bianca Schacherl

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  1. S. Olivia Gunther
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  2. Bianca Schacherl
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Correspondence to S. Olivia Gunther or Bianca Schacherl.

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Gunther, S.O., Schacherl, B. The quest for safer nuclear fuels. Nat Rev Chem (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-024-00596-0

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