Multimodal tomography for characterization of irradiated PWR fuel rod samples to observe the fuel-cladding interface

This experiment is dedicated to transmission X-Ray diffraction and fluorescence measurements on three nuclear fuel samples with different burnup prepared from a fuel irradiated in a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). The specific area of interest of the fuel samples for this experiment is the intermediate layer of zirconia at the Fuel-Cladding Interface (FCI ~ 8-10 µm thickness). The main goal is to use the multimodal tomography characterization: the high sensitivity and the spatial resolution will allow to observe fuel and zirconia phases structures, and their components, and to acquire structural information, i.e. lattice parameters, microstrains, and grain size, at the Zr|ZrO2|UO2 interfaces. Thus, the results of this experiment, which would be a first experiment on this kind of samples, will allow to improve the knowledge of the interface between fuel and cladding and FCI evolution with irradiation.