MIDAS October Seminar - Fabiola Cappia - 20th October

'Advanced post-irradiation examinations of nuclear fuels at Idaho National Laboratory'

This month's MIDAS Seminar will be given by Dr Fabiola Cappia from Idaho National Lab. Fabiola will give a talk titled 'Advanced post-irradiation examinations of nuclear fuels at Idaho National Laboratory', and you can read the abstract below.

The meeting will be held on Zoom at 2pm (UK time) on Wednesday 20th October. The Zoom link can be found here.

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Abstract

Upon accumulation of burnup in reactor, the performance of nuclear fuel changes with time due to chemical and microstructural modifications occurring in the fuel during in-reactor operation. The experimental analysis of irradiated fuel microstructure is challenging due both to the high radiation fields involved in handling such samples and the structural heterogeneities which result from the burnup and irradiation temperature gradients. These have been long-standing problems that have hindered the detailed study of irradiated fuels at micrometric level.

However, in the last ten years deployment of Focused Ion Beam (FIB) sectioning and development of new solution to shield instrumentations has made possible to scale down sample sizes and apply the latest characterization techniques even to high burnup fuels. Such approaches offer unprecedented opportunities for the study of nuclear fuel microstructure. The combined use of FIB and state-of-the-art analytical techniques (e.g., Transmission Electron Microscopy, in-situ nano-indentation) are particularly attractive to study the heterogeneous structure of the irradiated fuels, as it offers the main advantage to reduce the amount of radioactive material necessary for testing as well as the dose to workers. These techniques can be successfully employed to provide unique data with a resolution not achievable before, in order to understand fuel performance in different type of fuels.

Examples of recent results obtained on both Accident Tolerant Fuels and fuels for Advanced Reactors will be presented in this seminar.

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The monthly MIDAS Seminars, organised by MIDAS team members Ben Jenkins and Rehana Jalil, are a great opportunity to view work both directly relevant and adjacent to the MIDAS programme. The seminars are given by a range of researchers across the world, with a mixture of focuses from academia to industry.

Looking forward to seeing many of you there!