Arthur Situm

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In the fight against climate change, Canada and many other countries are placing a renewed focus on nuclear power due to its ability to supply baseload power without releasing greenhouse gases. Much of this focus has been on small modular reactors (SMRs), which offer the potential for improved cost-efficiency through fleet-scale deployment and small up-front financing costs, as well as the opportunity for deployment to remote regions to remote regions when compared to large-scale nuclear power plants. In addition to deploying SMR designed to be scaled-down versions of conventional water-cooled reactors, Canada is also planning on deploying Generation IV (GenIV) SMRs, which provide increased output temperatures necessary for various industrial processes that currently use fossil fuels.

As the Canada Research Chair in SMR Safety and Licensing, Prof. Situm's group will investigate challenges surrounding the corrosion or corrosiveness of nuclear fuel proposed for use in various SMR designs in order to improve the safety and support the licensing of these SMR designs. The following are the current set of research focuses:

• The study of the corrosion and hydrogen absorption of accident tolerant fuel (ATF) cladding materials
• Corrosion mitigation of steel and nickel alloys in molten salts to be used in molten salt reactors (MSRs)
• Incorporation of SMR waste streams into Canada's radioactive waste strategy