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Nuclear Science User Facilities 18 I would say that stock in the nuclear portfolio is higher than it has been in recent years says Steve Schlahta director of the Nuclear Science Project Management Office at PNNL.Were committed to a significant internal investment leveraging our materials science specifically our spectroscopy capabilities which we feel are hallmarks in this area.We recently invested over 2 million in a JEOL aberration- corrected transmission electron microscope one of the few in the world.Were also putting a FIB in the Radiochemical Processing Lab RPL as well as several other instruments and adapting a 30-ton INSTRON load frame to work inside a shielded hot cell all of which make the RPL one of the gems of the Office of Science stable. In the past the RPLs mission was largely Hanford-related.Today PNNL manage- ment assesses it as a billion-dollar asset. And in order to make sure it remains such a vital part of their portfolio its important to make sure the lab is being used. One of the ways they do that is by taking part in NSUFs partnership program. Staff Engineer David Senor has been PNNLs chief liaison with the NSUF over the past five years and will complete his term as chair of the Users Organization the group that oversees that program in June 2015. Its tough to pin down PNNLs specialties because were so diverse says Senorbut I think the biggest benefit we bring to NSUF is extra post-irradiation examination PIE capacity. If you look at these types of experiments the bottleneck usually comes after the irradiation is done. So the more PIE capacity a user facility can put together the more responsive they can be to the PIs in getting the results of irradiation experiments out in a timely fashion.Another major piece of that is our irradiation experiment design and fabrication capability.Very few places in the country retain that expertise these days. So besides playing a role in preparing for PIE if there are limitations at the user facility on the front end of irradiation experiments we can help alleviate a log jam there as well. Were pretty nimble facility-wise too adds Schlahta.We have a lot of flexibility with what we can put into our modular hot cells especially with the new INSTRON load frame and thats not the case with some of the other NSUF partners. On the other side of the equation Schlahta agrees that being an NSUF partner also helps PNNL. I think this is a great example of how the DOE system should work he says. We have some very specific capabilities that give us an entre and partnering with NSUF gives us some excellent opportunities to actually demonstrate what we can do. One such opportunity currently on PNNLs PIE plate is a fuel project headed by Dr. Mehdi Balooch at the University of California Berkeley UCB.The objective is to develop a hydride fuel that would potentially replace the uranium-dioxide UO2 fuel currently used in LWRs and to explore the use of a liquid metal as a replacement for helium to fill the pellet cladding gap. The problem with UO2 is that it has a low conductivity explains Balooch so if you want to get the most energy out of it you have to go close to 2000C.The hydride fuel we are proposing has a conductivity five times higher than UO2 so in order to get the same amount of energy out of it you only have to go up to around 600C. It also has better properties in terms of neutronics and safety. Beginning in 2010 the fuel elements for the experiment were made at UCB. They were put into the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology MIT reactor in 2011 and in the spring of 2014 three capsules of irradiated samples were sent to PNNL.All of these institutions are NSUF partner facilities. Only one capsule has been disassembled for PIE.The other two will be shipped to INLs sample library where all that material will become available to other researchers. The multifacility track followed by this experiment is a perfect example of the kind of collaboration fostered by NSUFs partnership program. We received the capsules at PNNL in March 2014 Senor saidthen we had to build the fixturing and figure out the best way to take them apart. Disassembly was done in the fall and now weve started cutting up the samples and getting into the examination phase. Experiment Manager Andy Casella organized groups of PNNL scientists with specific areas of expertise to examine the samples. Mehdi has a list of questions he would like to get answered with these samples said Casellaso were trying to figure out the best way to use the facilities we have to generate those results.That way we can tie the begin- ning of the experiment to the conclu- sion so it can be presented in a way that is easily digested. This is not the end of the story said Balooch. Were hoping to get to the point where a decision can be made as to whether its worth it to continue this research or not and 90 percent of that takes place here in the PIE work. Its