Enhanced Accident Tolerance of Thoria-Based Nuclear Fuels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many factors need to be investigated before alternative nuclear fuel can be adapted for service in the harsh environment of a nuclear reactor. Urania, used conventionally as a nuclear fuel, has a low thermal conductivity, which degrades with increasing stoichiometric deviation. Thoria-based fuel has been considered as an alternative fuel, since it does not oxidize and has a high melting point and higher thermal conductivity. Simulations have shown that the fuel melting observed in urania fuel rods during an accident with steam ingress should not be observed (or will be delayed) in thoria as its thermal conductivity remains high enough to dissipate excessive heat in the center of the fuel pellets. The thermal gradient also remains low and therefore thermal stress is reduced, which should improve the longevity of the fuel. Thoria also has some other desirable properties as our calculations predict a significantly higher temperature of oxygen lattice premelting than urania. Furthermore, we found that the diffusion of fission gas, e.g., helium, is strongly affected by oxygen diffusion and therefore is slower in thoria for the temperatures where the oxygen lattice premelts in urania, but not in thoria.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".