Q&A: Why this Lab Expert Pushes Nuclear Fuels to the Limit with Transient Testing

For more than two decades, the Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) sat in standby, depriving the United States of a place capable of producing bursts of energy five times more powerful than a commercial power plant.

TREAT is essential to testing the safety of nuclear power plant fuels, which is why the reopening of the facility in 2017 was such a momentous occasion. TREAT took the next step in its comeback tour this week with the restoration of its testing capabilities.

Daniel Wachs, TREAT’s transient testing science lead, said his goal with the facility is to “fundamentally change the way nuclear fuel technology is developed and break the barrier to seeing new nuclear technology deployed.”

After the successful completion of the first test, Wachs answered a variety of questions about the facility, the efficacy of such testing, the future of nuclear energy and more.

How did you prepare for the first fueled test in more than 25 years at TREAT?

The TREAT reactor transient experiments can be tailored to deliver a neutron field that imitates the potential (likely or unlikely) conditions that nuclear fuel may experience during normal operation or accidents. We spent the last several months conducting “dry runs” at TREAT (transient experiments without a fuel sample in the reactor). We needed to demonstrate that we could deliver the specific nuclear conditions that match design basis accidents considered for commercial power reactors before we started fuel tests.

However, the response of the fuel to that nuclear stimulus is very dependent on the environment it’s immersed in. For water-cooled reactors (like those currently used at commercial power plants), that environment is high-pressure, high-temperature water. The experiment team used this time to design test devices that deliver these conditions while fitting into TREAT's experimental cavity (~4"x8" and 6' long). It was also necessary to develop and qualify the instruments (through in-reactor testing) used to monitor the incredibly rapid fuel response in real time to provide the modeling and simulation teams with data to test their codes against.

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