Categorical Exclusion Determination
Office of NEPA Policy and Compliance
October 3, 2016
Estimated Read Time min
The Colorado School of Mines, in collaboration with the Idaho National Laboratory, proposes to collect first-ever irradiation performance data for stainless steel and Inconel specimens produced using a range of commercially available additive manufacturing techniques. The University will conduct pre-irradiation thermo-mechanical testing and micro-structural characterization of the specimens at the University’s facilities. A subset of the tensile bar specimens will be irradiated to a range of fast neutron fluences at typical light water reactor temperatures in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). Thermo-mechanical testing and micro-structural characterization of the irradiated specimens will be conducted at the Advanced Test Reactor National Scientific User Facility (ATR-NSUF) post-irradiation facilities. The remaining un-irradiated specimens will be thermally aged at the University and subjected to post-aging thermo-mechanical testing and micro-structural characterization. A comparison of the physical properties and microstructure of the irradiated specimens to those of the as-fabricated and thermally-aged specimens will provide insight into the viability of additively manufactured parts for nuclear reactor applications, identify key areas of concerns for further technology development efforts, and provide data for future computational model development.