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Pulse irradiation tests of two types of rock-like oxide (ROX) fuel, i.e. yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) and YSZ/Spinel composite, were conducted in the Nuclear Safety Research Reactor (NSRR) to investigate the fuel behavior under reactivity-initiated accident conditions. The ROX fuels failed with cladding burst at fuel volumetric enthalpies above 10 GJ m −3 , which was comparable to that of UO 2 fuel. The failure of the ROX fuels, however, occurred with considerable fuel melting and was quite different to that of UO 2 fuel, which was caused by cladding melting and embrittlement due to heavy oxidation. Lower fuel melting temperature of the ROX fuels compared to that of UO 2 contributed to the different fuel failure modes. Certain amount of molten ROX fuel dispersed out at the failure. However, the mechanical energy generation due to the molten fuel/water interaction was negligible for the ROX fuels at peak fuel enthalpies below 12 GJ m −3 .

An MMI bistable laser diode optical flip-flop has been developed for all-optical packet switching networks. All-optical switching of 320 Gb/s packets has been successfully demonstrated by an optical label memory based on the optical flip-flop.

We have developed a new type of DOP monitor having high measurement accuracy of less than 1%. The DOP monitor was realized by using a monolithically integrated polarizer array manufactured by the auto-cloning technology. (2 pages)