National Postirradiation Examination Workshop Report

A National Post-Irradiation-Examination (PIE) Workshop was held March 29-30, 2011, in Washington D.C., stimulated by the DOE Acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy approval on January 31, 2011 of the “Mission Need Statement for Advanced Post-Irradiation Examination Capability”. As stated in the Mission Need, “A better understanding of nuclear fuels and material performance in the nuclear environment, at the nanoscale and lower, is critical to the development of innovative fuels and materials required for tomorrow’s nuclear energy systems.” (2011) Developing an advanced post-irradiation capability is the most important thing we can do to advance nuclear energy as an option to meeting national energy goals. Understanding the behavior of fuels and materials in a nuclear reactor irradiation environment is the limiting factor in nuclear plant safety, longevity, efficiency, and economics. The National PIE Workshop is part of fulfilling or addressing Department of Energy (DOE) missions in safe and publically acceptable nuclear energy. Several presentations were given during the opening of the workshop. Generally speaking, these presentations established that we cannot continue to rely on others in the world to provide the capabilities we need to move forward with nuclear energy technology. These presentations also generally identified the need for increased microstructural understanding of fuels and materials to be coupled with modeling and simulation, and increased accessibility and infrastructure to facilitate the interaction between national laboratories and participating organizations. The overall results of the work of the presenters and panels was distilled into four primary needs 1. Understanding material changes in the extreme nuclear environment at the nanoscale. Nanoscale studies have significant importance due to the mechanisms that cause materials to degrade, which actually occur on the nanoscale. 2. Enabling additional proficiency in experimentation and analysis through robust modeling coupled with advanced characterization. 3. Advancing the infrastructure and accessibility of physical and administrative systems needed to meet the needs of participating organizations that are subject to different time cycles and constraints that make working and collaborating the national laboratories challenging. 4. Pursuing in-situ analysis and instrumentation to support the examination of dynamic changes to materials’ microstructure, deformation, and surface effects as they occur with time scales rather than the static comparison offered by current PIE methods. This Workshop Report responds to the research challenges for advanced/future PIE needs for nuclear materials development outlined by Energy Secretary Chu and the DOE-NE Research and Development Roadmap report, which was delivered to Congress in April 2010, (DOE-NE, 2010) by identifying the technial needs for fuel and material development specifically related to PIE. The information from the panels address these research challenges by identifying specific needs related to each of the topical areas. The focus of the Workshop was to identify gaps in the enabling capabilities for nuclear energy research and to identify high-priority fundamental capabilities to enable research to be completed that would likely have high impact on enabling nuclear energy as a significant contributor to energy production portfolios