Changes (or lack thereof) since 2012
- Still no decision on nuclear new build: remains a major threat
- Strong pull from industry regarding skills etc, but academic staff base may not be able to meet demand
- International collaboration improving, e.g., through joint India and DOE grants
- Coherent national programmes and international representation needed
- Growing imbalance between capital and operational budgets
- Opportunities to exploit national facilities and link to international programmes
Deliver life-extensions for operating reactors
- Development of multiscale constitutive models for operating materials:
- irradiation embrittlement
- stress corrosion cracking
- creep
- All including validation by comparison with experimental data
- Near-service-conditions component testing
- Extrapolating from the lab to the plant
- Development and validation of models for component performance
- Long-term testing as part of development programmes
- Development of monitoring and NDE techniques
Positive Developments – NNUF,JHR
Design and development of new and optimised materials for new-build and future reactor systems
- Development of multiscale constitutive models for operating and new materials; characterisation of materials properties and performance
- Whole-life design from production through fabrication to operation and eventual disposal
- Manufacturing routes, design for manufacturability
- Access to in-reactor test programmes
- Integrated modelling and experimental validation-based development of materials
- Degradation studies including irradiation embrittlement; stress corrosion cracking; creep
- Near-service-conditions component testing
- Extrapolating from the lab to the plant
- Development and validation of models for component performance
- Long-term testing as part of development programmes, including long-term tests at ISIS and Diamond Monitoring of materials state in new plant to provide validation for models
- Design and development of new and optimised materials for new-build and future reactor systems
Concerns:
- Can we have any meaningful involvement with new build?
- Need to develop the UK knowledge base
- Influence via the regulator?
Opportunities:
- Gain access to surveillance testing programmes
- Be the partner of choice for structural materials assessment and research
- Develop full-scale test techniques and facilities in the UK
National archive of reactor-exposed materials and components
- The UK does not have a systematically-constructed materials archive for samples extracted from operating plant for test purposes. Such an archive would provide enormous value in research programmes underpinning future designs, enabling the development and modelling of the mechanisms of degradation in materials under in- service conditions.
- An archive would facilitate development of future research programmes, studying the origins of degradation in plant materials
- Opportunity for NNUF, NNL and academic groups to work together
- Look to have an international co-ordination on this, with bilateral access to samples, databases and test results