Effects of neutron irradiation at 70-200°C in beryllium

At present beryllium is considered one of the metals to be used as a plasma facing and blanket material. This paper presents the investigations of several Russian beryllium grades fabricated by HE and HIP technologies. Beryllium specimens were irradiated in the SM reactor at 70-200 degreesC up to a neutron fluence (0.6-3.9) x 10(12) cm(-2) (E > 0.1 MeV). It is shown that the relative mass decrease of,beryllium specimens that were in contact with the water coolant during irradiation achieved the value >1.5% at the maximum dose. Swelling was in the range of 0.2-1.5% and monotonically increasing with the neutron dose. During mechanical tensile and compression tests one could observe the absolute brittle destruction of the irradiated specimens at the reduced strength level in comparison to the initial state. A comparatively higher level of brittle strength was observed on beryllium specimens irradiated at 200 degreesC. The basic type of destruction of the irradiated beryllium specimens is brittle and intergranular with some fraction of transgranular chip. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.