6. Outlook

One of the major challenges facing materials science today is to provide the nuclear power industry with predictive modeling of the performance of the materials it uses. Indeed, the projected extension of the lifespan of nuclear power plants, the storage of long-lived radioactive waste and the development of new-generation reactors all require the implementation of powerful and robust means of predicting the long-term behavior of materials. It is impossible to base these predictions on an exclusively experimental and empirical basis, and highly reliable predictive models need to be developed. To be robust, these models must be founded on a physical basis, as far as possible on the most reliable physics, which is often but not exclusively the atomic scale, and this modeling must be closely coupled with experimentation.

The outlook for the coming years is for increasingly...