Understanding the radiation embrittlement of reactor pressure vessel (RPV) steels is required to be able to operate safely a nuclear power plant or to extend its lifetime. The mechanical properties degradation is partly due to the clustering of solute under irradiation. To gain knowledge about the clustering process, a Fe−1.1 Mn−0.7 Ni (at.%) alloy was irradiated in a test reactor at two fluxes of 0.15 and 9 × 10 17 n E>1MeV .m −2 .s −1 and at increasing doses from 0.18 to 1.3 × 10 24 n E>1MeV .m −2 at 300 • C. Atom probe tomography (APT) experiments revealed that the irradiation promotes the formation in the α iron matrix of Mn/Mn and/or Ni/Ni pair correlations at low dose and Mn-Ni enriched clusters at high dose. These clusters dissolve partially after a thermal treatment at 400 • C. Based on a comparison with thermodynamic calculations, we show that the solute clustering under irradiation can just result from an induced mechanism.
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