Fission products behaviour in UO2 submitted to nuclear severe accident conditions

The objective of this work was to study the molybdenum chemistry in UO2 based materials, known as SIMFUELS. These materials could be used as an alternative to irradiated nuclear fuels in the study of fission products behaviour during a nuclear severe accident. UO2 samples doped with 12 stable isotopes of fission products were submitted to annealing tests in conditions representative to intermediate steps of severe accidents. Samples were characterized by SEM-EDS and XAS. It was found that Mo chemistry seems to be more complex than what is normally estimated by thermodynamic calculations: XAS spectra indicate the presence of Mo species such as metallic Mo, MoO2, MoO3 and Cs2MoO4.Peer reviewe