Molten Salt Reactors represent a promising lead for Gen-IV nuclear reactors wit inherent safety features and the possibility to reuse the spent fuels of PWR. Two halides are envisioned for this concept, namely fluorides and chlorides salts. Their choice is justified either by their thermo-physical properties or by their compatibility with the already-existing infrastructures.
Despite their numerous advantages, halides salts -and more specifically chlorides and fluorides- are highly hygroscopic leading to a very aggressive impurity-driven corrosion of the structural materials. In order to investigate both the mechanism of this phenomenon and its kinetics, corrosion studies are carried out worldwide at the lab scale. Due to the plurality of experimental procedures and equipment, the literature is rich but the published data are usually scattered and therefore not usable to compare the corrosion behaviour of materials across different facilities.
The ENHARMONY project aims at providing guidelines for salt purification and corrosion testing in order to standardize corrosion experiment in molten halides. To do so, the corrosion behavior of two materials (stainless steel and nickel-based alloy) in either molten fluorides or molten chlorides will be investigated in several european laboratories following the same experimental procedures and aiming at having a good reproducibility.