D. Manara and F. De Bruycker

2.04.1 Introduction

Research on actinide carbides as nuclear fuel began in the 1950s. Then, uranium dioxide and mixed uranium-plutonium oxides began to be preferred as nuclear fuel in most of the Generation II and III power plants, due to the fact that the option of fast reactors for civil purposes had mostly been aban­doned. This led to an abrupt interruption in actinide carbide research between the first half of the 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. In the last decade, there has been renewed interest in actinide carbides in view of a nuclear fuel more suitable for high burnup and high-temperature operation with a reduced ‘margin to melting,’ in the framework of the ‘Generation IV’ nuclear systems development.1 Consequently, actinide carbides are now being stud­ied with more and more advanced methods, both experimental and computational.

The goal of the present monograph is to summa­rize the state-of-the-art knowledge of the most rele­vant physical and chemical properties of actinide carbides. This work is largely based on a few earlier reviews on the same subject: Storms,2 Rand,3 Holley et a/.,4 Matzke,5 the Gmelin Handbooks,6-9 and the OECD-NEA reviews.10-13 More detailed and/or more recent data are taken from single references.