Question: What exactly do you do each day, as we know how to use nuclear power?

Ellie Young answered on 24 Feb 2021:

Good question. We do know how to generate electricity from nuclear fission, for example for civil power plants or to power submarines. However, it is really important to be able to prove that the materials that are used in such reactors remain safe over the lifetime, because reactor environments are really harsh, and neutrons can damage materials and change their properties. There is a legal requirement to understand this, and my research is in understanding damage and helping to show that current materials are essentially still safe after 40+ years in a reactor! New fission reactors require materials with different properties, and so I also research new materials, where there is often little knowledge or experience of their behaviour over time.

Also, my research applies to nuclear fusion – we currently don’t have a nuclear fusion plant that produces net electricity out on a large scale, so there is loads of research into finding new materials and designs so that the world can have nuclear power that generates no long lived radioactive material or waste! This is a huge advantage over fission reactors, so I am doing a lot of fusion research to help reach this goal.

Day to day, this varies. I spend most of my time is spent planning and doing test irradiations so that I can purposefully mimic fission or fusion damage (the mechanisms are different!), and then analysing the samples to understand and quantify the damage that has been induced. A lot of this is modelling and data analysis to find out what is really going on so the community can use this to inform future nuclear decisions! I also feed my findings back to nuclear fission and fusion companies who are either trying to extend the lifetime of their reactors, or to commission new reactor designs.