a b s t r a c tAs a result of in-reactor corrosion during operation in nuclear reactors, hydrogen can enter the zirconium fuel cladding and precipitate as brittle hydride particles, which may reduce cladding ductility. Dissolved hydrogen responds to temperature gradients, resulting in transport and precipitation into cold spots so that the distribution of hydrides in the cladding is inhomogeneous. The hydrogen precipitation kinetics plays a strong role in the spatial distribution of the hydrides in the cladding. The precipitation rate is normally described as proportional to the supersaturation of hydrogen in solid solution. The proportionality constant, a 2 , for hydride precipitation in Zircaloy-4 is measured directly using in situ synchrotron X-Ray diffraction, at different temperatures and with three different initial hydrogen concentrations. The results validate the linear approximation of the phenomenological model and a near constant value of a 2 = 4.5 Â 10 À4 s À1 was determined for the temperature range studied.

We are developing detector architectures and devices based on the novel carbon nanomaterial graphene, which has been shown to exhibit unusual electrical properties of potential use for next-generation radiation detectors. Of particular interest is the use of this technology to develop novel neutron detectors.To this end, we are studying architectures based on a neutron absorbing converter material in conjunction with a graphene field-effect transistor (GFET). As an intermediate step towards the demonstration of GFET neutron detectors we utilize an alpha source to systematically study the effect of charge deposition on the device response. As an added benefit, this experiment helps us elucidate the important systematics of response to other types of radiation, including the dependence of the magnitude of graphene resistance modulation on the deposited energy and the dependence of device speed on the morphology of energy deposition.