Students Involved: Ryan Hayes, Haley Williams

The University of California, Berkeley has been working in a collaborative effort with University of Virginia, Bowling Green State University, North Carolina State University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in order to advance our Fundamental Understanding of Transport Under Reactor Extremes. The research is conducted as an Energy Frontier Resource Center, funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the United States Department of Energy.

The goal of the institutions listed above are to better understand how the high radiation field, high temperatures, high stresses, and corrosive environment within a nuclear reactor couple together to affect the properties of materials within the reactor. Our group’s focus has been the investigation of molten salt’s chemical role in the corrosion of materials at high temperatures.

The home page for the effort can be found here.

Publications

Winner, N., Williams, H., Scarlat, R. O., & Asta, M. (2021). Ab-initio simulation studies of chromium solvation in molten fluoride salts. Journal of Molecular Liquids, 335, 116351.

EFRC Newsletter: Clean energy you don’t have to take with a grain of salt