Education and Training Series #76: Overview of Nuclear Graphite R&D in Support of Advanced Reactors

These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.

These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG). 

As arguably the very first nuclear reactor core material, graphite has been utilized in a variety of nuclear applications since Enrico Fermi first stacked up bricks of graphite in a university squash court. But why? Graphite is not the first material that comes to mind when considering the extreme environment anticipated within a nuclear core. Materials with high strength, toughness, hermeticity, and hardness are traditional material choices for this demanding application. Graphite exhibits only moderate, or even low, values for these material properties. This presentation will address these issues and attempt to demonstrate that graphite is nearly the perfect material choice for these (Very) High Temperature Reactor designs. The latest information on graphite’s unique crystal structure and bulk microstructure which provide the desired properties, the (baffling) irradiation behavior, the expected response to anticipated degradation, and how the nuclear graphite community is establishing the operational safety envelop of the core components within these new advanced reactor designs will be discussed. We’ll finish up with a short demonstration of why nuclear graphite cannot burn (No, Chernobyl graphite fires did not happen).