Low-Carbon Future
Shaping Canada's energy transition
May 9, 2024
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"Copper is the material chosen as a barrier as part of Canada's nuclear waste strategy. This barrier is designed to last 1 million years, making corrosion studies critical." Art of Research Photo: Copper Oxide Growth Patterns by Jeffrey Wang, Graduate Student, Mechanical and Materials Engineering.
The federal government鈥檚 outlines a roadmap for SMRs to become the future of Canada鈥檚 nuclear industry. On Tuesday, the federal government through the Alliance grants program to support the development of this technology, which will position Canada as a clean energy leader in the transition to a low-carbon future. A funding partnership between the (NSERC) and (NRCan), this round of Alliance grants is focused on advancing research into SMRs by facilitating collaborations between universities, industry, and not-for-profits.
Queen鈥檚 researcher Laurent Karim B茅land (Mechanical and Materials Engineering) was awarded $1.2 million to explore a joint experimental and computational approach to the accelerated qualification of nuclear materials for SMRs.
Extreme conditions
Dr. B茅land鈥檚 research seeks to enhance the understanding of how materials behave under extreme conditions in the context of next-generation nuclear reactors. From the computational approach, the team, including researchers from the Universit茅 de Montr茅al, will work to improve the kinetic Activation Relaxation Technique, a code that simulates how materials respond to radiation damage. This Canadian-based code鈥攃onsidered best-in-class internationally鈥攊s unique in its ability to capture atom-by-atom changes in the materials over timescales comparable to experiments and reactor operations. Their efforts to rewrite the code will make it more versatile and user-friendly, helping them to understand the long-term behaviour of materials in SMRs and potentially accelerate their qualification process.
Dr. Laurent Karim B茅land (Mechanical and Materials Engineering)
Using an experimental approach, the team will employ proton irradiation to study the effects on various materials with a focus on their microstructure and mechanical properties. These experiments will work hand-in-hand with the computational approach to validate the output of the simulations. Dr. B茅land will also be collaborating with several other research groups advancing SMR research such as MIT, NRCan, CanmetMATERIALS, and the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), with whom Queen鈥檚 recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to expand our nuclear research program.
The overall goal of the project is to develop safer and more efficient SMRs through providing valuable insights into material performance under extreme conditions and a more enhanced scientific understanding of those underlying processes, potentially accelerating the deployment of SMRs by several years.
Materials degradation
Queen鈥檚 researchers (Mechanical and Materials Engineering) and (Mechanical and Materials Engineering; Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy), Canada Research Chair in Nuclear Materials and Mechanics of Materials, are also co-applicants on a successful Alliance grant led by Western University. Their project will examine the long-term containment of SMR fuel waste.
Expanding Queen鈥檚 nuclear research program
鈥淭his round of Alliance-funded projects is working towards realizing Canada鈥檚 Small Modular Reactor Action Plan, addressing critical areas of research around supply chains, fuel supply, and safety,鈥 says Nancy Ross, Vice-Principal (Research). 鈥淲ith recognized research strength in nuclear materials, Queen鈥檚 is a key player actively sought out to partner with industry, government, and other prominent research institutes to help shape Canada鈥檚 low-carbon energy transition.鈥
Queen鈥檚 is leading nuclear engineering research through several initiatives including the , of which Drs. B茅land, Persaud, and Daymond are members, and the (RMTL), a state-of-the-art facility built to advance the development and increase the lifespan of existing and new nuclear reactors which recently received a $8.6 million investment from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Queen鈥檚 also welcomed the appointment of Yanwen Zhang as the new Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Impact of Radiation in Energy and Advanced Technologies. Dr. Zhang鈥檚 research program, which seeks to predict the degradation of alloys in the high-intensity environments of nuclear reactors, will relocate to Queen鈥檚 and receive an investment of $8 million through the .
To learn more about the other Alliance-funded projects, visit the .
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