FUTURE—Fundamental Understanding of Transport Under Reactor Extremes

Within a nuclear reactor, materials experience multiple extreme environments, including corrosion and irradiation. While there have been decades of research examining these two environments individually, there has been relatively little work devoted to studying the coupled effects of these two environments on the evolution of materials. FUTURE – Fundamental Understanding of Transport Under Reactor Extremes – is an Energy Frontier Research Center dedicated to understanding how these two extreme environments couple. In this talk, we highlight the recent progress and achievements of FUTURE. We have developed an in situ positron capability to quantify defects as they are being produced during irradiation and revitalized the Irradiation-Corrosion Experiment (ICE) which allows for the concurrent exposure of a material to irradiation and corrosion in a controlled setting with in situ monitoring. Using isotope markers, we quantify radiation-enhanced diffusion in various relevant materials and use those to validate a mesoscale model that then provides predictions of the impact of irradiation on corrosion. Together, these advances and capabilities provide new insight into the coupled effects of irradiation and corrosion on materials evolution.