Publications

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The National Nuclear Security Administration's Tritium Sustainment Program is responsible for the design, development, demonstration, testing, analysis, and characterization of tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) and their components, in addition to producing tritium for the nation's strategic stockpile. The FY18 call for proposals included the specific basic science research topic, "Demonstration and evaluation of advanced characterization methods, particularly for quantifying the concentration of light isotopes (¹H, ²H, and ⁴He, ⁶Li, and ⁷Li) in metal or ceramic matrices". A project IWO-389859 was awarded to the Ion Beam Lab (IBL) at Sandia-NM in FY18. This reports the success we had in developing and demonstrating such a method: 42 MeV Si^{+ 7} from the IBL' s Tandem was used to recoil these light isotopes into special detectors that separated all these isotopes by simultaneously measuring the energy and stopping power of these reoils. This technique, called Heavy Ion - Elastic Recoil Detection or HI-ERD, accurately measured the enriched 6 Li/Li-total of 0.246 +- 0.016, compared to the known value of 0.239. The isotopes ¹H, ²H, ⁴He, ⁶Li and ⁷Li were also measured. (page intentionally left blank)

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This project focused on providing a fundamental mechanistic understanding of the complex degra- dation mechanisms associated with Pellet/Clad Debonding (PCD) through the use of a unique suite of novel synthesis of surrogate spent nuclear fuel, in-situ nanoscale experiments on surrogate interfaces, multi-modeling, and characterization of decommissioned commercial spent fuel. The understanding of a broad class of metal/ceramic interfaces degradation studied within this project provided the technical basis related to the safety of high burn-up fuel, a problem of interest to the DOE.

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Materials subjected to high dose irradiation by energetic particles often experience severe damage in the form of drastic increase of defect density, and significant degradation of their mechanical and physical properties. Extensive studies on radiation effects in materials in the past few decades show that, although nearly no materials are immune to radiation damage, the approaches of deliberate introduction of certain types of defects in materials before radiation are effective in mitigating radiation damage. Nanostructured materials with abundant internal defects have been extensively investigated for various applications. The field of radiation damage in nanostructured materials is an exciting and rapidly evolving arena, enriched with challenges and opportunities. In this review article, we summarize and analyze the current understandings on the influence of various types of internal defect sinks on reduction of radiation damage in primarily nanostructured metallic materials, and partially on nanoceramic materials. We also point out open questions and future directions that may significantly improve our fundamental understandings on radiation damage in nanomaterials. The integration of extensive research effort, resources and expertise in various fields may eventually lead to the design of advanced nanomaterials with unprecedented radiation tolerance.