Cryogenic Irradiation of Superconductors

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) was formed in 1954 when the UK Government set up a new body to oversee the nation’s nuclear research programme. UKAEA’s principal mission is to lead the commercial development of fusion power and related technology and position the UK as a leader in sustainable nuclear energy.

One project within UKAEA’s remit is the STEP programme which is looking to design a commercially viable, compact fusion reactor, collaborating with partners to build a UK prototype by 2040. The first major milestone is for STEP to produce a viable concept design by 2024.

The magnet system in STEP, which confines the plasma, will operate at cryogenic temperatures (<30K) and will be exposed to ionising radiation, primarily neutrons and gamma rays. There is a requirement to understand how the magnet materials will behave under these conditions. In order to characterise the behavior of these materials at these temperatures, UKAEA is exploring the feasibility of exposing samples to neutron radiation at cryogenic temperatures and maintaining the samples in a cold chain until analysis.

The STEP programme is seeking to understand the potential avenues to acquire this data and seeks responses from the following types of organisations:

Organisations with access to a reactor or beamline, with the capacity to irradiate several samples to a fluence of at least 1022 neutrons/m2 in under a year. The expectation is that multiple samples will be irradiated simultaneously, although this is not an absolute requirement if the flux is high enough to still allow several samples to reach the desired fluence in the given timeframe.

Organisations with the engineering capacity to design and/or manufacture experimental equipment for insertion of cryogenically cooled samples into a reactor or beamline.

Organisations such as test reactor institutes, or engineering companies with access to test institutes.