• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.603-616
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• 2007

Roy Huddle, having invented the coated particle in Harwell 1957, stated in the early 1970s that we know now everything about particles and coatings and should be going over to deal with other problems. This was on the occasion of the Dragon fuel performance information meeting London 1973: How wrong a genius be! It took until 1978 that really good particles were made in Germany, then during the Japanese HTTR production in the 1990s and finally the Chinese 2000-2001 campaign for HTR-10. Here, we present a review of history and present status. Today, good fuel is measured by different standards from the seventies: where $9*10^{-4}$ initial free heavy metal fraction was typical for early AVR carbide fuel and $3*10^{-4}$ initial free heavy metal fraction was acceptable for oxide fuel in THTR, we insist on values more than an order of magnitude below this value today. Half a percent of particle failure at the end-of-irradiation, another ancient standard, is not even acceptable today, even for the most severe accidents. While legislation and licensing has not changed, one of the reasons we insist on these improvements is the preference for passive systems rather than active controls of earlier times. After renewed HTGR interest, we are reporting about the start of new or reactivated coated particle work in several parts of the world, considering the aspects of designs/ traditional and new materials, manufacturing technologies/ quality control quality assurance, irradiation and accident performance, modeling and performance predictions, and fuel cycle aspects and spent fuel treatment. In very general terms, the coated particle should be strong, reliable, retentive, and affordable. These properties have to be quantified and will be eventually optimized for a specific application system. Results obtained so far indicate that the same particle can be used for steam cycle applications with $700-750^{\circ}C$ helium coolant gas exit, for gas turbine applications at $850-900^{\circ}C$ and for process heat/hydrogen generation applications with $950^{\circ}C$ outlet temperatures. There is a clear set of standards for modem high quality fuel in terms of low levels of heavy metal contamination, manufacture-induced particle defects during fuel body and fuel element making, irradiation/accident induced particle failures and limits on fission product release from intact particles. While gas-cooled reactor design is still open-ended with blocks for the prismatic and spherical fuel elements for the pebble-bed design, there is near worldwide agreement on high quality fuel: a $500{\mu}m$ diameter $UO_2$ kernel of 10% enrichment is surrounded by a $100{\mu}m$ thick sacrificial buffer layer to be followed by a dense inner pyrocarbon layer, a high quality silicon carbide layer of $35{\mu}m$ thickness and theoretical density and another outer pyrocarbon layer. Good performance has been demonstrated both under operational and under accident conditions, i.e. to 10% FIMA and maximum $1600^{\circ}C$ afterwards. And it is the wide-ranging demonstration experience that makes this particle superior. Recommendations are made for further work: 1. Generation of data for presently manufactured materials, e.g. SiC strength and strength distribution, PyC creep and shrinkage and many more material data sets. 2. Renewed start of irradiation and accident testing of modem coated particle fuel. 3. Analysis of existing and newly created data with a view to demonstrate satisfactory performance at burnups beyond 10% FIMA and complete fission product retention even in accidents that go beyond $1600^{\circ}C$ for a short period of time. This work should proceed at both national and international level.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.10 no.10
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• pp.261-268
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• 2021

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which users can utilize computing resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. In a cloud system, resources can be dynamically scaled up and down to the user's on-demand so that the total cost of ownership can be reduced. The Modeling and Simulation (M&S) technology is a renowned simulation-based method to obtain engineering analysis and results through CAE software without actual experimental action. In general, M&S technology is utilized in Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Multibody dynamics (MBD), and optimization fields. The work procedure through M&S is divided into pre-processing, analysis, and post-processing steps. The pre/post-processing are GPU-intensive job that consists of 3D modeling jobs via CAE software, whereas analysis is CPU or GPU intensive. Because a general-purpose desktop needs plenty of time to analyze complicated 3D models, CAE software requires a high-end CPU and GPU-based workstation that can work fluently. In other words, for executing M&S, it is absolutely required to utilize high-performance computing resources. To mitigate the cost issue from equipping such tremendous computing resources, we propose HEMOS-Cloud service, an integrated cloud and cluster computing environment. The HEMOS-Cloud service provides CAE software and computing resources to users who want to experience M&S in business sectors or academics. In this paper, the economic ripple effect of HEMOS-Cloud service was analyzed by using industry-related analysis. The estimated results of using the experts-guided coefficients are the production inducement effect of KRW 7.4 billion, the value-added effect of KRW 4.1 billion, and the employment-inducing effect of 50 persons per KRW 1 billion.