“…However, as noted above SiC has known issues with degradation from palladium-SiC interaction (palladium attack) [30], permeability to certain fission products (e.g., silver), and rupture at higher temperatures [31,32]. ZrC has the potential to be an improved barrier layer as compared to SiC for a number of reasons [33], which include resistance to palladium attack [34][35][36], higher melting temperature (3693 K) for ZrC (3123 K carbon eutectic) vs. 2818 K for SiC [37], reduced particle rupture rates at high temperatures [35,38,39], and apparently increased retention of some metal fission products (e.g., silver) [35,38,40,[42][43][44][45].…”