Investigation of Potential Material Inhomogeneity in the Magnetically Detected Neutron-Irradiation-Generated Structural Degradation of Nuclear Reactor Pressure Vessel Steel

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It was my pleasure  to read well made manuscript. Nevertheless, a few points have to be  proposed to correct.

1. Paper is devoted to  correlations. It would be important if all figures will be provided with error bars.

2. Fig.5b? if fact, shows an absence of the correlation. This should be commented.

3. Total percentage  in the Tables 1,2 is less than 100%. The mail component either  should be  included in the table, or it should be included in the table caption. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper builds upon previous work to show that magnetic measurements can correlate well both to mechanical properties as well as neutron dose for materials relevant to reactor pressure vessels. The point of this paper was to follow-up on comments made about the original paper to show the validity of the method. Overall, the work is quite impressive and the results seem sound, there are just a few comments that would improve the clarity and possibly strengthen the argument:

1. Figure 1 has low resolution.
2. It looks like the Charpy samples and the blocks were irradiated at different temperatures. Could you comment on how you think the difference in temperature should or should not affect the end results?
3. You use the phrase "optimally chosen MAT descriptor" to avoid going into too much detail about the matrix elements, but it is not clear whether it is the same every time. Does the optimization depend just on the material, or does each sample have its own optimally chosen MAT descriptor? Please comment on this.
4. I think the graphs showing the ratio of the MAT descriptor for both the irradiated and unirradiated samples still gives good data even if there is large scatter. It is interesting that materials that are magnetically dissimilar before irradiation seem to change a different amount after irradiation. Investigating this phenomenon further is obviously outside of the scope of this paper, but perhaps a few more comments on it would be worthwhile. What would be the recommendation if someone were thinking of implementing this method as a monitoring system for their reactor? Only use samples that are magnetically similar from the beginning? Choose several different types that are expected to be representative of the reactor pressure vessel and follow each sample to understand potential weak spots? Something else entirely? I don't doubt that this could be a very useful technique, especially since it is nondestructive, but more comments on how it could be implementing would be nice.
5. On the topic of nondestructive techniques, one particular advantage would be the ability to reuse samples because the measurement of interest would not consume the sample. Does taking the measurement alter the sample in any way? Is the MAT technique reproducible?

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf