Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Sid Pathak is an assistant professor at Iowa State. He is leading the team that will test the material samples for the second layer. When the material powder made by the Ames Lab group is ready, it will be formed into plates at PNNL by spraying the powder onto a surface.
Pathak said, “Once you make that plate, we need to test its properties, particularly its response under the extreme radiation conditions present in a fusion reactor, and make sure that we get something better than what is currently available. That's our claim, that our materials will be superior to what is used today.”
Pathak explained that it can take ten to twenty years for radiation damage to appear on materials in a nuclear reactor. It would be impossible to recreate that timeline during a three-year research project. Instead, his team utilizes irradiation to see how materials respond in extreme environments. His team will use a particle accelerator to attack a material with ions available at University of Michigan's Michigan Ion Beam Laboratory. The results will simulate how the material is affected by radiation.
Pathak said, “Ion irradiation is a technique where you radiate [the material] with ions instead of neutrons. That can be done in a matter of hours. Also, the material does not become radioactive after ion irradiation, so you can handle it much more easily.”
There is one disadvantage to the use of ion irradiation. The damage caused by the ions only penetrates the material one or two micrometers deep. This means that it can only be seen with a microscope. Testing materials at these very small depths requires specialized tools that work at micro-length scales such as those which are available at Pathak's lab at Iowa State University.
Tiarks said, “The pathway to commercial nuclear fusion power has some of the greatest technical challenges of our day but also has the potential for one of the greatest payoffs—harnessing the power of the sun to produce abundant, clean energy. It's incredibly exciting to be able to have a tiny role in solving that greater problem.”
Argibay commented that “I'm very excited at the prospect that we are kind of in uncharted water. So there is an opportunity for Ames to demonstrate why we're here, why we should continue to fund and increase funding for national labs like ours, and why we are going to tackle some things that most companies and other national labs just can't or aren't. We hope to be part of this next generation of solving fusion energy for the grid.”
Extreme levels of temperature and pressure are required for the creation of nuclear fusion on the surface of the Earth. This means that new materials must be developed and tested to withstand these extreme conditions before commercial nuclear fusion will be possible. The prospects are bright for the development of commercial nuclear fusion but there are many technical challenges that must be solved before fusion energy will be available at grid scale.