Evaluation of surface deposits on the channel wall of trepanned reactor core graphite samples

Samples have been trepanned from the fuel and interstitial channel walls of PGA graphite reactor cores of two Magnox gas cooled power stations after a period of service. These samples have been considered explicitly for the presence of deposits on the channel facing surfaces. A combination of focused ion beam milling and imaging has been used to determine the presence of such deposits and where present to make measurements of the thickness. These thicknesses vary from a few nanometres to tens of micrometres. In addition, both the chemical composition and chemical state have been investigated using energy dispersive X-ray microanalysis in a scanning electron microscope and Raman spectroscopy respectively. EDX measurements showed that surface deposits found on the channel walls of one of the reactors contained increased concentrations of oxygen, iron, chromium and sulphur compared with the underlying material. Raman spectroscopy also suggested that the deposit had a smaller crystallite size than PGA graphite. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.