Recent Progress of the DUPIC Fuel Fabrication in Korea

DUPIC powder and pellets were successfully fabricated in accordance with the quality assurance program described in the Quality Assurance Manual for DUPIC fuel fabrication, which was developed on the basis of the CAN3-Z299.2-85 standard. This manual describes the quality management system applicable to the activities performed for DUPIC fuel fabrication. It covers the work processes, policies and procedures used for planning, executing, and verifying the work carried out for DUPIC fuel fabrication. It is important that a Quality Program is in place before the fabrication of the fuel for irradiation testing. In order to qualify the DUPIC pellet manufacturing processes, 3 series of experiments for the pre-qualification and 3 series for the qualification were performed. In these experiments, the optimum process conditions were established. Then, under the control of the QA program, 8 series of production runs were performed to make the qualified DUPIC pellets in a batch size of 1 kg. In these production runs, DUPIC fuel pellets satisfying the standard CANDU fuel pellet specifications could be successfully produced.