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Meeting the growing energy demand from an increasing population while addressing the depletion of fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gases is the one of the greatest scale challenges of the 21st century. Currently, around 15% of the world’s electricity is generated by nuclear fission energy, the largest supply by any non-greenhouse gas emitting resource, and it will be critical to the country’s energy mix if the UK is to meet its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as evidenced by the construction of the UK’s first nuclear power plant in two decades at Hinkley point C.
New nuclear power plants and technologies have been identified as key requirements to meet carbon emissions and electricity demand, which will operate novel nuclear fuel materials under much harsher radiation and temperature environments than previous generations of nuclear plants. A fundamental, mechanistic understanding of their properties under radiation damage, high temperature, and corrosive conditions is needed to develop the technologies.
This requires probing the materials at the micro- and nano-scale using advanced electron microscopy techniques. However, due to the intrinsic radioactive nature of the materials, specific facilities must be utilized for this work.
In this talk, the development and commissioning of a new alpha radionuclide focused ion beam scanning electron microscope (FIB-SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) facility at the University of Manchester will be presented along with several case studies of work enabled to highlight the impact the systems have for the nuclear materials community.
About the speakers
Dr. Robert Harrison, Senior Lecturer, the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) at the University of Manchester (UoM)
Dr. Harrison graduated with a Master’s degree in chemistry from UoM before holding a position in the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL). He then completed his PhD in nuclear engineering at Imperial College London in 2015. Following his PhD, he held a post-doctoral research position at the University of Huddersfield working on in situ transmission electron microscopy and ion irradiation of nuclear materials before starting in his position as Plutonium Research Fellow at UoM in 2018. He currently holds an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship in radiation effect in advanced nuclear fuels and cladding materials. Dr. Harrison works on several projects in the area of advanced field-assisted sintering of nuclear fuels. He leads the development of actinide-capable facilities and alpha nuclide active electron microscopy suite installation and commissioning at the Henry Royce Institute. Thanks to his expertise in nuclear fuels and irradiation damage analysis, he was invited to be the Technology Platform Lead for the Fuels and Irradiated Materials Analysis platform, which feeds into several key research areas in Royce, including nuclear materials, materials for extreme environments (M4DE), and imaging and characterization.
Dr. Min Wu, Sr. Product Specialist PFIB, Materials Science, Thermo Fisher Scientific
Dr. Min Wu is trained materials scientist and microscopist who received a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2015. Since 2016, she has been working for Thermo Fisher Scientific as an application scientist and product specialist for SEM and DualBeam technology with a special interest in plasma FIB.