Development and deployment of a diverse mixture of economic and environmentally sustainable energy sources is important for international energy security. Two of the leading large-scale energy options, fossil and nuclear (fission and fusion) energy, are heavily dependent on high performance structural materials in order to achieve their full potential. There are important synergies in the development of new high performance structural materials for these energy options that can be beneficially exploited to achieve higher electricity production per unit of consumed fuel. In particular, high densities of highly stable nanoscale precipitates can simultaneously enable high creep strength up to very high temperatures (thereby allowing the possibility of ultra-supercritical steam or other high thermodynamic efficiency conversion systems) and also impart dramatic improvements in neutron radiation resistance to property degradation. The materials science principles for simultaneously achieving high thermal creep strengths and radiation resistance are briefly outlined, and prospects for accelerating the discovery, development and deployment of new high performance materials are discussed.
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