This invention relates to rendering irradiated nuclear fuel pins of metal-sheathed refractory pellets into short lengths (typically 2 cms) so that they can be fed, in an acceptable form, to chemical dissolver apparatus.
The current practice for rendering fuel pins into short lengths (such as the fuel pins coming from irradiated fast reactor fuel elements) is to crop them using a shearing machine. The shearing action on a pin (which typically comprises a stainless steel sheath and refractory oxide fuel pellets ) causes fairly rapid wear on the shearing blade and also tends to fold over the sheared sheath end so that, when the cropped length is subjected to dissolving liquids, the liquids are somewhat inhibited from reaching the fuel pellets.
The present invention avoids the above stated adverse feature in a compact machine.