Jo joins us as part of an EPSRC Open Fellowship. Her project is titled The dragon whisperer: understanding beryllide materials for fusion tritium breeding.
This project is bringing a whole new field of research to Sheffield. Jo will be collaborating with researchers in Karlsruhe in Germany - the team making the material she is working on - as well as the UKAEA and the UK National Ion Beam Centre in Huddersfield, Cumbria, and Surrey. She will also be using the EPSRC funded ARCHER2 supercomputer.
Jo’s main research interests are beryllides, transmission electron microscopy both for developing new characterisation techniques and in concert with other methods, and fusion materials in general.
We asked Jo to explain more about the fellowship and what she hopes to achieve.
“The biggest problem for nuclear fusion is producing more energy than you put in, and to do this we need to fuse the hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium. But tritium doesn't occur naturally, we have to make it, and then it decays quickly. To make the bigger fusion reactors like EU-DEMO feasible, we need to make ("breed") tritium on site through a complicated chain of nuclear reactions.
“A material that could be mega-efficient in one of the links of this reaction chain is beryllium, in the form of titanium beryllide (TiBe12). Reactor designers around the world are working on tritium breeding modules with TiBe12 in. But we don't know this material as well as we think.
“In 2022 I sat in front of a microscope and watched this material in slight horror as we held it around and above operating temperature and hit it with helium ions to simulate the reactor environment, and it filled with defects - and we don't even really know what the defects are and whether, like defects in many materials, they can trap radioactive tritium gas atoms. Worse, the type of defect changes depending what temperature you irradiate it at and how much material is around it, which means there could be a temperature and pressure regime where the defects suddenly change, break the material apart and release tritium into the environment.
“So this fellowship has one major aim - find out what these defects are! How are the atoms arranged on them? Can they trap tritium? How do they depend on pressure and temperature? All of this is toward the goal of finding out what this material would do if there is an accident and it goes above operating temperature, and how we can design the surrounding module to keep it safe. It might turn out to be fine - but if it's not fine, we need to know now.”
