The US and the UK have fabricated test capsules made up of advanced metal alloys and graphite and are now aiming to evaluate their potential use in future advanced nuclear power reactors.
The capsules will undergo irradiation testing later this year at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
The US Department of Energy said the UK research team assembled eight capsules at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham campus in Oxfordshire after the experimental design was finalised at INL.
The capsules are comprised of 578 samples of structural materials including advanced steel and various forms of graphite.
Researchers hope to understand how each sample responds to neutron irradiation and high temperatures to evaluate their potential use in advanced reactors, including high-temperature gas cooled reactors which are being developed and deployed by both countries.
The capsules have been shipped to the US and will be loaded into INL’s Advanced Test Reactor, which is the world’s highest power test reactor, and will be exposed to temperatures up to 750 to mimic the conditions in an advanced reactor.
The capsules will then be disassembled at INL’s hot fuel examination facility so that the research teams can analyse how the materials performed.
The materials will later be available to the public for further examination through the NSUF’s Material Library – an open archive of over 9,000 irradiated nuclear fuel and materials samples.
NSUF is the only designated nuclear energy user facility in the US. It offers a consortium of state-of-the-art irradiation, post-irradiation testing facilities, and high-performance computing that can be used to support nuclear energy research and development.
The project was part of a larger effort between the two countries to share facilities to advance civilian nuclear energy technologies.
