INL National University Consortium – Annual Report 7 INL, MIT Collaborate to Advance Molten Salt Reactors Picture a single grain of sand. Now split that into 50 pieces. Something that small is difficult to imagine and impossible to see with the naked eye. But that fragment, roughly 10 microns or one one-hundredth of a millimeter, is the width of the sample Lingfeng He, an instrument scientist and senior research scientist at Idaho National Laboratory, analyzed in hopes of aiding the advancement of Generation IV molten salt reactors. The microscopic sample He received from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nuclear Reactor Laboratory is made of Hastelloy-N, a nickel-based alloy. This material is considered the best candidate for structure materials for the current prototype of molten salt reactors; however, little research has been done on the corrosion resistance of Hastelloy-N while in a reactor. Receiving the sample from MIT after it had been exposed to molten FLiBe salt for 1,000 hours in the test reactor, He analyzed the sample using a transmission electron microscope in the Irradiated Materials Characterization Laboratory at the Materials and Fuels Complex. Lingfeng He examines the MIT sample at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex.