THE ANALYSIS OF IRRADIATION CREEP EXPERIMENTS ON NUCLEAR-REACTOR GRAPHITE

The phenomenon of irradiation creep in graphite is essential to the de sign and construction of graphite-moderated reactors. Recent experimen tal results have shown large apparent reductions in creep rate for cre ep strains greater than +/- 1%. It is shown that this is not a true re duction in creep rate, but is an artifact resulting from changes in th e properties of the stressed samples, which modify their dimensional c hanges under irradiation compared to the unstressed control samples, a nd this is not accounted for in the standard definition of creep strai n.