Development of advanced materials Sample Clauses

Development of advanced materials. The milder action of one or another material degradation factor depending on the component is generally a positive fact, that allows designers to reduce the requirements on materials for specific parts of the plant. However, for some components or parts of components it may happen that no design-driven ageing mitigation strategy can be identified that guarantees their fitness for purpose over a sufficiently long timespan. This means that the availability of the component will not allow an affordable and/or fully safe functioning of the system. In this case there is a strong push to identify materials with better properties or to suitably modify and protect those that are available to improve their properties, or even to develop altogether new materials. This applies specifically to commercial GenIV reactors, because it is very unlikely that the high fuel burnups and operating temperatures targeted in these systems, in contact with non-conventional coolants, can be fully achieved with existing materials, under the overarching principle of safety. It is well-known that prototypes and demonstrators will operate at conditions that are not optimal in terms of efficiency and waste minimisation, at smaller scale and power than eventual commercial reactors, because this is the only way to be compatible with the conditions that existing materials can tolerate, based on existing qualification data and return of experience. To ensure the commercial deployment of truly GenIV systems with a design lifetime of 60 years and sustaining high fuel burn-ups and transmutation, materials of better performance are needed. This requires a significant research and development effort towards: (i) the identification of effective materials solutions to mitigate the consequences of the harsh conditions that are met in the reactors; (ii) the improvement of the properties of existing materials by identifying more suitable fabrication or treatment processes; and (iii) in some cases even the elaboration of completely new materials. It is quite clear that the development of materials implies not only the elaboration of the materials architecture, production or treatment route and identification of reliable joining techniques, but also the qualification of the result of this effort via exposure to suitable conditions, very much in the same way as in the case of existing materials to be qualified for the prototypes. The difference is that the first goal here is not to define correlations an...