b'The development of a Laser Ablation Mass Spectroscopy system at UC Berkeley provides the pathway to analysis and process highly dangerous material in a non-contact fashion enhancing worker safety, data output and reducing costs to obtain data on nuclear materials.evaluation (including thermal properties), isotope distribution, swelling, mechanical properties, andFigure 2. One of the students, (Chai microstructural changes to assessPeddeti), working with the ICP MS performance in service are difficult,installed at UC Berkeley for the FLAME-CAMP programtime consuming, and costly tasks. It is the aim of this proposal to develop and demonstrate femtosecond laser ablation-based diagnostic and processing of materials in a rapid throughput and low-cost fashion, while developing new materialsconductivity make this new capa-sampling capabilities not deployedbility extremely valuable for PIE on in the nuclear materials researchirradiated fuel rods. This system will field presently. This unique systemenable a fast and cost-effective fuel focuses on irradiated fuel rod inves- rod evaluation, accelerating nuclear tigation and, therefore, be designedfuel cycle research. This approach for hot cell applications and radioac- will enable fast and effective PIE tive specimens. The precision andfuel rodlet examination, thereby power of modern lasers enablesreducing costs and accelerating an accurate and high throughputresearch. Furthermore, this work specimen evaluation. The combi- will pave the way to a completely nation of non-contact (reducednew set of tools deployable for any contamination), rapid removal rates,radioactive sample of interest.and direct measurement of localized elemental composition and thermal 2023|AFC ACCOMPLISHMENTS 171'