Temperature accelerated dynamics study of migration process of oxygen defects in UO2

We studied the migration dynamics of oxygen point defects in UO2 which is the primary ceramic fuel for light-water reactors. Temperature accelerated dynamics simulations are performed for several initial conditions. Though the migration of the single interstitial is much slower than that of the vacancy, clustered interstitial shows faster migration than those. This observation gives us important insight on the formation mechanism of high-burnup restructuring, including planar defects and grain sub-division (the rim structure), found in UO2.