Nowadays two important nuclear fuel performance requirements have been addressed: high burnup in order to improve fuel cycle economic aspect and accident tolerant fuel to enhance the safety under accident condition. The accident tolerant fuel particularly becomes very important issue after Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011. The initiatives of R&D program toward to accident tolerant fuel comprises different countries, organizations and including fuel vendors. The Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) can be defined as enhanced fuel which can tolerate loss of active cooling system capability for a considerably longer time period and the fuel/cladding system can be maintained without significant degradation and can also improve the fuel performance during normal operations and transients, as well as design-basis accident (DBA) and beyond design-basis (BDBA) accident. Different materials have been proposed as fuel cladding candidates considering thermo-mechanical properties and lower reaction kinetic with steam and slower hydrogen production, besides that an evaluation of the neutronic aspects for several cladding candidates is important and shall be evaluated. Depending of the outcome of this evaluation, the fuel enrichment level changes to higher than actual level shall be necessary to overcome the neutron absorption penalty. The aim of this work is to perform a preliminary neutronic assessment of fuel cladding based on iron alloy considering a standard PWR fuel rod (fuel pellet and dimension). The main purpose of the assessment is to quantify the penalty due to increase of neutron absorption in the cladding materials and some others fuel parameters are evaluated in order to overcome such penalty. In addition to neutronic assessment, the criticality safety aspects due to increase of fuel enrichment level are briefly presented and discussed.