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Supported by Sellafield Ltd., this exciting and fully funded PhD studentship will seek to extend the successful work previously undertaken at the University of Bristol to improve our understanding of the expected behaviour of irradiated uranium fuel materials in nuclear storage facilities. Specifically, the project will examine the role of stress corrosion for the uranium system, determining how it influences the behaviour and rates of degradation. In this hands-on experimental study you will be using cutting edge materials analysis techniques and laboratories available at the Interface Analysis Centre in Bristol, a leading international centre for uranium research. You will work alongside academics and industrial collaborators, with visits and trial experiments at partners sites across the UK. Bulk crystals can display heavy fermion behaviour, where the effective mass of mobile carriers can be up to 1000 times larger than the bare electron mass due to electron-electron interactions. Many of these materials are U-based compounds, such as UGe2 and UPt3, and they also display a range of other fascinating physics including unconventional superconductivity, quantum criticality and magnetism. The ability to grow such materials as thin films opens up a range of interesting possibilities: (i) we can explore the effect of dimensionality by tuning the film thickness; (ii) apply compressive and tensile strains using different crystalline substrates to tune the emergent physics; (iii) we can create more complex structures such as superlattices and device architectures to interrogate the system in novel ways. While there have been a few studies in these directions there is a vast range of opportunities open to explore. In Bristol we have a thin film sputtering system, unique in the UK, capable of growing compounds of uranium in high quality single crystal form. In the coming 18 months this system will be upgraded to a National Nuclear User Facility with added capabilities. This project will leverage this equipment to investigate the materials aspects of growth as well as the low temperature properties of various U-based compounds in the search for novel tuning parameters to control heavy fermion behaviour, superconductivity and magnetism in these materials. The proposed project is an opportunity to combine the tritium research, design, and handling experience in the H3AT department at UKAEA, the bold vision of a fusion power plant in the STEP project run by UKAEA and the world leading diamond voltaic research at the University of Bristol to tackle one of the key challenges on the path towards the realisation of commercially viable fusion power. Careful management of tritium is critical to ensure the successful operation of a deuterium-tritium burning power plant, current tritium monitoring systems are not up to the challenging demands of fusion fuel facilities planned over the coming decades. This research project will undertake the development of a new technology for tritium radiation detection based on CVD diamond voltaic structures that employ 2D materials as the Schottky contact. The work will be conducted primarily at Bristol with periods of secondment to the UKAEA to conduct material and device evaluations in active environments. The aim of this project is to predict the behaviour of slowly-released buoyant gasses in a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) and inform the design of ventilation for such facilities. Geological disposal involves isolating radioactive waste in a vault deep inside suitable bedrock to ensure that no harmful quantities of radioactivity ever reach the surface environment. A GDF will be a highly engineered structure consisting of multiple barriers designed to provide protection over hundreds of thousands of years. Hydrogen gas – which is potentially flammable – can arise from the corrosion and degradation of certain types of radioactive waste. Ventilation of hydrogen is a significant engineering challenge for a GDF; new research is required to inform the design of the vaults themselves and size the mechanical ventilation for them. Here our focus will be to migrate existing understanding of special cases into the more general GDF context to predict the likely evolution of hydrogen concentrations. The key scientific challenge lies in estimating the rate of molecular mixing in a vault environment that will have thermal sources and may become density-stratified.Investigating the effects of stress on the corrosion of metallic uranium
Heavy fermion thin films
Deployable tritium detector using diamond voltaic structures for use in fusion fuel handling facilities
Ventilation of Hydrogen in a Geological Disposal Facility
