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The big challenge with today's light water reactors
is that we want to extend their life.
they're reaching the end of their license but not they're useful life.
that means that the materials are going to be exposed to higher and higher 0:00:23.749,0:00:26.810 levels of damage
The outcome of this work is really addressing two major issues with regard to energy.
one is keeping our light water reactors
operational
past their
original license period
that's important because in the U.S.
nuclear reactors and nuclear energy is about twenty percent of our electricity
but more importantly
it's most of our carbon free electricity.
we lose that
we lose our carbon free advantage in this country.
The second issue is
being able to use these accelerators to qualify materials for advanced reactor
concepts and those advance reactors are important because
first they are more economical
they're safer
they produce less waste
than conventional reactors
and they represent the future of an energy source which again
is carbon free
and very robust in terms of lifetime and economics.
the communities also looking at new advanced reactor types, fast reactors
where the radiation damage in course is even higher levels
and those damage levels are very difficult to achieve in test reactors
in fact in the U.S. we don't have test reactors
to get to these levels that we need to get to
so we can understand how materials are going to behave.
so our approach to this
is to use ion accelerators
like the one sitting behind me here.
What we do is we simulate radiation effects
in a reactor using this accelerators
We simulate the temperatures and
can cause damage at higher damage rates
and so the challenge
is trying to figure out
how to conduct a radiation
such that
the resulting structure looks the same
after our radiations as it does in a reactor.
If we can do that
We'll be able to attack these problems much much quicker and develop materials and
new concepts
much quicker
in fact it will almost be impossible to do so
without the ability to use accelerators like this,
to accelerate the radiation damage phenomenon.
but we can't simulate everything with one accelerator.
Turns out we need multiple accelerators
actually three in total.
because under radiation the major things that occur are two.
One, we create damaged by displacing atoms,
and two, we create new materials new isotopes by transportation reactions.
So this accelerator can create the damage. We need another accelerator
to implant these species
that occurs by transportation in the reactor.
So we're redesigning this laboratory
to accommodate three accelerators the one behind me one in front of me and a brand
new one that we will be receiving in November of twenty thirteen
and the objective is to make a national user
facility out of this laboratory
where we can conduct
very high fidelity radiation damage experiments
to capture all the elements of a reactor core
and make these experiments then applicable
for future concepts or life extension
of light water reactors.