Ceramics are key engineering materials in many industrial domains. The evaluation of radiation damage in ceramics placed in a radiative environment is a challenging problem for electronic, space and nuclear industries. Ion beams delivered by various types of accelerators are very efficient tools to simulate the interactions involved during the slowing-down of energetic particles. This article presents a review of the radiation effects occurring in nuclear ceramics, with an emphasis on new results concerning the damage build-up. Ions with energies in the keV-GeV range are considered for this study in order to explore both regimes of nuclear collisions (at low energy) and electronic excitations (at high energy). The recovery, by electronic excitation, of the damage created by ballistic collisions (swift heavy ion beam induced epitaxial recrystallization process) is also reported.