[en] A study was made to develop a method for evaluation of the local strain in a cladding tube of the Advanced Thermal Reactor due to radial cracking of a UO₂ fuel pellet. Effects of the number of cracks, initial crack width and the friction coefficient of a pellet-clad interface on behaviors of the local strain in a cladding tube were evaluated with a modelized experiment. A Zircaloy-2 ring specimen with inner diameter of 95 mm, height of 25 mm and wall thickness of 5 mm was expanded at room temperature with equally divided peripheral dice of a tool steel set in a specimen. The dice were divided into 8, 12 or 16 pieces. For each dividing number, two dice edge geometries were prepared, that is, not chamfered and chamfered by 2 mm. Strains of an external surface of the specimen were measured with 28 wire strain gages with gage length of 0.3 mm. The friction coefficient on the pellet-clad contact surface was not measured, but two friction conditions were prepared. One was metal-metal contact and the other was a contact surface coated with teflon film. The estimated friction coefficient was 0.1 for the former and 0.05 for the latter. An elastic-plastic analysis was carried out in order to evaluate the membrane hoop strain in the cladding tube. The analysis was made under two conditions. One was a plane stress condition of a radial and hoop stress which resembled the state of stress-strain developed in the ring specimen. The other was a plane strain condition of a radial and hoop strain which approximated the stress-strain state in a cladding tube