Impact of nuclear transmutations on the primary damage production: The example of Ni based steels

Abstract

The recent nuclear evaluations describe more accurately the elastic and inelastic neutron-atoms interactions and allow calculating more realistically primary damage induced by nuclear reactions. Even if these calculations do not take into account relaxation processes occurring at the end of the displacement cascade (calculations are performed within the Binary Collision Approximation), they can accurately describe primary and recoil spectra in different reactors opening the door for simulating aging of nuclear materials with Ion Beam facilities. Since neutrons are only sensitive to isotopes, these spectra must be calculated weighting isotope spectra by the isotopic composition of materials under investigation. To highlight such a point, primary damage are calculated in pure Ni exhibiting a meta-stable isotope produced under neutron flux by inelastic neutron-isotope processes. These calculations clearly point out that the instantaneous primary damage production, the displacement per atom rate (dpa/s), responsible for the micro-structure evolution, strongly depends on the N59i isotopic fractions closely related to the inelastic neutron isotope processes. Since the isotopic composition of the meta-stable isotope vanishes for large fluences, the long term impact of this isotope does not largely modify drastically the total dpa number in Ni based steels materials irradiate in nuclear plants.