Speaker
Description
In situ accelerator materials science is poised to unlock far more information regarding how nuclear materials behave under irradiation, if utilized properly. Many of the questions which need answering for both fission and fusion power cannot be readily answered with increasingly rare neutron sources, nor do they need them at this stage. Before any neutron irradiation should take place, discovery of relative kinetics of radiation-induced microstructural changes, keyed to experimentally-verified inference models of changes vs. dose is what can speed up the discovery, development, and deployment of nuclear materials by orders of magnitude.
In this talk, we highlight a few such areas where such inference models, linked to in situ measurements during ion irradiation, yield crucial new insights into material evolution during irradiation. We show how radiation can sometimes slow corrosion in molten salt and liquid lead, delocalizing it to become less severe from a crack propagation perspective. We demonstrate the onboard detection of tungsten fuzz evolution during combined irradiation and plasma attack at high temperatures, revealing the kinetics of its growth. Real-time picosecond ultrasonics during irradiation can reveal timescales of radiation-induced phase precipitation or dissolution. Finally, we tackle the effects of in situ irradiation on superconductivity in ReBCO, where deconvoluting the effects of beam heating from actual defects remains a challenge. In all cases, in situ irradiation experiments utilizing ion accelerators allows us to peer into the future of deployed nuclear materials, where they will be subject to all components of their respective reactor environments at once.
