Instrumental Development for the Characterization of Nuclear Materials

Dear Colleagues,

The characterization of nuclear material is a true challenge for researchers in applied sciences for two main reasons. Firstly, nuclear materials are radioactive and contaminating, and thus, they cannot be handled without safe protection of both users and instrumentation, generally in dedicated laboratories named hot labs. Secondly, the understanding of the phenomena occurring during the operation of nuclear fuel requires experiments that can provide information at the atomic scale in extreme conditions, because irradiation produces damage at the atomic scale under huge thermal gradient and mechanical loading. Up to the 2000s, usual metallographic methods such as optical microscopy provided most of the characterization results about nuclear materials. Since then, following the improvement of scientific instrumentation, many new experimental apparatus have been implemented in hot labs, with two main trends: multi-instrumentation and miniaturization of the samples.

There have been some reviews about instrumentation for nuclear material characterization, but these are becoming old, and a further step is being taken with the transportation of radioactive samples which are small enough to be handle outside of hot labs—in synchrotron facilities, for example. The purpose of this Special Issue is to provide an overview of the achievements made in the last 20 years. This time scale may look strange for researchers involved in light science, but it is more understandable keeping in mind that the average delay for installing a new apparatus in a hot lab varies from one to several years. This overview will offer the opportunity to have a full length description of apparatus set-up and performances, enlightening the ingenuity of their designer, the efforts of the engineers to make them fit within safety standards, and their invaluable contribution to the science of nuclear materials.

Dr. Lionel Desgranges
Guest Editor

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• instrumentation
• irradiation
• contamination
• nuclear materials
• hot lab