Fundamental Understanding of Transport Under Reactor Extremes FUTURE

Advancing Knowledge of Material Behavior Under Nuclear Reactor Extremes

FUTURE, an Energy Frontier Research Center, investigates how radiation, corrosion, and extreme stresses impact material properties in nuclear reactors.

The Fundamental Understanding of Transport Under Reactor Extremes (FUTURE) is an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Science. FUTURE focuses on understanding how materials respond to the intense conditions within nuclear reactors, such as radiation damage, corrosive environments, high stress, and extreme temperatures. During irradiation, energetic particles create high concentrations of defects, altering the atomic transport processes that drive corrosion and material degradation. These mechanisms of atomic movement vary with local stresses and temperature, leading to changes in material properties over time. FUTURE’s goal is to unravel the complex interactions among these factors to better predict and improve material performance in reactor environments.

FUTURE's renewal

In 2022, the Office of Basic Energy Science announced that the FUTURE Energy Frontier Research Center would be renewed for another four years. FUTURE 2.0 will build upon the research conducted in FUTURE 1.0, with a focus on how a material’s heterogeneities regulate the fundamental mechanisms that dictate a material’s response during coupled irradiation and corrosion.

FUTURE 2.0 will bring together researchers from FUTURE 1.0 from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, Bowling Green State University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Virginia. The renewal will also support the addition of a new partner at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Research

FUTURE is organized into three Thrusts that target the fundamental behavior of materials under the coupled extremes of irradiation and corrosion.

Research Plan

We combine experiment and modeling to understand the fundamental processes responsible for materials evolution under concurrent irradiation and corrosion. Our focus is on materials heterogeneities - those aspects of materials that deviate from non-ideality and dictate the properties of the material.

Each of the thrusts in FUTURE is motivated by a specific scientific hypothesis that gets at the heart of the problem we are addressing:

• The energy landscape for transport in compositionally-heterogeneous alloys and oxides alters the rate and prevailing mechanisms of corrosion and is, in turn, modified by irradiation.
• The thermokinetics of defect evolution and thus ongoing corrosion, thermally and under irradiation, differ in a multiphase vs. single phase material.
  The dynamics of transport that drive corrosion through extended defects and their networks are altered under irradiation.
• Tying the Thrusts together are Cross-Cutting science Topics related to different corrosion environments: oxide-forming corrosion and molten salt corrosion.

Together, these Thrusts interrogate the fundamental mechanisms responsible for materials evolution that drive the response under coupled reactor extremes.

Productivity 

Peer-reviewed publications, conference and workshop presentations, and citations highlighting the work of FUTURE.

FUTURE Staff

The staff of FUTURE features scientists, postdocs, students, and administrators from leading research institutions, including national laboratories and universities.