Radiation re-solution of fission gas in non-oxide nuclear fuel

To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Elsevier and can be found at: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-nuclear-materials.Renewed interest in fast nuclear reactors is creating a need for better understanding of fission gas bubble behavior in non-oxide fuels. Collisions between\ud fission fragments and their subsequent cascades can knock fission gas atoms out\ud of bubbles and back into the fuel lattice, resulting in a loss term for the bubble.\ud By assuming these collisions can be treated as binary collisions, we calculated a\ud re-solution parameter as a function of bubble radius. The calculations showed\ud that there is a sharp decrease as bubble size increases until about 100 nm when\ud the re-solution parameter stays nearly constant. The bubble size dependence\ud may explain the large bubble size distribution found in some uranium carbide\ud and nitride fuels. Furthermore, our model shows ion cascades created in the\ud fuel result in many more implanted fission gas atoms than collisions directly\ud with fission fragments. Utilization of our calculated re-solution parameter can\ud be used to find a re-solution rate for future bubble behavior simulations