he Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has entered a strategic research partnership with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, or UKAEA, to investigate how different types of materials behave under the influence of high-energy neutron sources. The $4 million project is part of UKAEA's roadmap program, which aims to produce electricity from fusion.

One of the most pressing challenges on the road to developing fusion energy is to find adequate materials that can withstand the extreme conditions of a fusion power system, including simultaneous bombardment by very high-energy neutrons and close proximity to the fusion plasma. Fusion plasma can reach temperatures of up to 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the center of the sun.

Over the next four years, UKAEA will place novel material samples into ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor to test their resilience under radiation. Scientists from ORNL's Fusion Energy Division and Materials Science and Technology Division — along with researchers from the UKAEA’s Materials division — will then analyze the samples to better understand their properties.

The effort is framed within the UK Fusion Materials Roadmap, an initiative that aims to deliver new neutron-resilient materials as well as irradiation and post-irradiation testing to provide design engineers with data to build future fusion power plants.