ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT, Nuclear materials under extreme conditions, Symposium K, E-MRS 2019 Fall Meeting, Warsaw, Poland, 16 - 19 September 2019

The Symposium focuses on new results about fabrication and performance of nuclear materials exposed to extreme conditions and radiation. This includes structural and fuel materials and their waste forms. A great emphasis is put on advanced approaches, such as experimental and computational multi-scale plus new fabrication techniques.One of the symposium organizers is Valentin Craciun from the National Institute for Laser, Plasma and Radiation Physics (NILPRP).

Scope:

The science and engineering of nuclear materials, and especially radiation induced effects, is an active field of research. Many workshops and conference on the subject are therefore application-oriented with a certain lack in addressing basic principles. The scope of our symposium is to highlight basic theoretical and experimental principles, focusing on the fabrication of nuclear materials and to describe key mechanisms responsible for their aging and degradation under the given exposure. The main goal of the symposium is to review the latest progress and chart future advances in experimental and modelling multi scale approaches to describe the synthetization and the behavior of these solids under extreme environments like irradiation, mechanical/thermomechanical stress, high temperature and/or chemically reactive environment.

The symposium will address topics pertaining to nuclear structural materials and fuels, their fabrication and performance under nuclear reactor conditions, especially advanced systems with more demanding parameters in temperature, radiation dose and corrosion. Moreover, the behavior of the waste forms in the repository or alternatively the reprocessing of fuel will be treated. The addressed theoretical methods span many orders of magnitude from ab-initio up to the mesoscale size. The experimental approaches emphasize the role of advanced techniques, which will allow the understanding of basic processes in synthesis of materials or their degradation mechanisms contributing to the validation of modelling results. As a special form of the connection between experimental and computations methods, machine learning will also be addressed in the symposium.

Hot topics to be covered by the symposium

Targeted materials/components

• Nuclear structural materials
• Nuclear fuels
• Nuclear waste forms

Scientific questions

• Synthesis of materials
• Multi scale modelling
• New experimental device
• New simulation tools

Methods

• Modelling from Ab-Initio to Mesoscale
• Advanced characterization techniques
• New fabrication techniques

Machine learning

A brief presentation of the symposium is found on the EMRS website:
https://www.european-mrs.com/nuclear-materials-under-extreme-conditions-emrs