Conventional alloys, Parkin says, are made up mostly of one material such as aluminum or iron. “The idea is if you design an alloy and then you hit it with a bunch of radiation, it’s just going to scramble everything up,” he explains. “You get defect formation that can mess with your macroscopic properties. We’re looking for alloys that can withstand high levels of radiation damage in fast reactors because the fast neutrons are much more damaging than in thermal reactors.”

Conventional alloys cannot withstand exposure to radiation for very long due to their finely tuned composition. Parkin hopes to discover a new alloy by combining many different elements to find just the right combination of equiatomic—or having an equal number of atoms—components.