Harnessing nuclear energy irradiation: tailoring advanced catalysts for environmental restoration and energy conversion

Abstract

Nuclear radiation engineering has emerged as a transformative platform technology, capitalizing on radiation-matter interaction phenomena to enable multidimensional applications. Particularly in accelerating the evolutionary trajectory of catalytic science, this modality has emerged as a pivotal enabler. Although numerous studies have documented irradiation-enabled enhancement of catalytic activity, thereby facilitating efficient environmental remediation and energy conversion implementations, systematic reviews on the improvement of catalyst performance achieved by irradiation technology are still lacking. The crux resides in the insufficient mechanistic elucidation of material structure-catalytic activity interdependencies between radiation effects and catalytic enhancement, which substantially impedes the rational exploitation of synergistic potentials in radiation-catalysis hybrid systems for broad and transformative applications. Within this background, the review systematically delineates fundamental principles governing nuclear radiation technology, radiation-enabled fabrication protocols and mechanism for catalyst synthesis, and intrinsic mechanistic relationships between irradiation effects and catalytic performance evolution. Furthermore, this review underscores the latest breakthroughs in the application of irradiation technology within the fields of energy and environmental catalysis research, aiming to showcase the forefront advancements in the interdisciplinary integration of irradiation techniques with catalytic systems. Finally, we reasonably evaluate the existing constraints of irradiation technology and its prospective future developments. Driven by continuous advancements in materials fabrication and irradiation engineering, irradiation technology is poised to assume a pivotal role across a series of critical domains in the foreseeable future.