Nuclear Energy Research Applications

Abstract

In general, accelerator ion beams play an important role in advancing nuclear energy research in three different ways. First, ion irradiation provides displacement damage in materials that bears similarity to neutron damage but with significantly greater damage rates (displacements per atom per second). Higher damage rates by ion irradiation make high radiation damage tests (e.g., 10s to 100s of dpa) feasible on advanced materials or new microstructures at a laboratory timescale. Second, He or H ion implantation allows for incorporating He or H atoms in research targets in a very controlled way in terms of doping concentration and depth distribution. In fact, there are a number of ion beam facilities available in the world that allow for simultaneous heavy ion irradiation (dpa) and He/H implantation (appm) so that He/dpa and/or H/dpa ratios (appm/dpa) in a given neutron environment are better emulated (Serruys et al. 2008). Third, ion beam analysis (IBA) techniques, particularly nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) and elastic recoil detection (ERD) analysis, provide excellent characterization tools to measure He and H depth profiles in materials of interest for nuclear energy applications (Wang and Nastasi 2009).