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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Tomaz Zagar, Matjaz Ravnik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 140 | Number 1 | October 2002 | Pages 113-126
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3327
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of activation studies of TRIGA research reactor concrete shielding are given. Samples made of ordinary and barytes concrete were irradiated in the reactor to simulate neutron activation in the shielding concrete. Long-lived neutron-induced gamma-ray-emitting radioactive nuclides were measured in the samples with a high-purity germanium detector. The most active long-lived radioactive nuclides in the ordinary concrete samples were found to be 60Co and 152Eu. In the barytes concrete samples, the most active long-lived radioactive nuclides were 60Co, 133Ba, and 152Eu. Activation in the concrete was also calculated using the ORIGEN2 code and compared to experimental results. Simple radioactive nuclide generation and depletion calculation using one-group cross-section libraries provided together with the ORIGEN2 code did not give conservative results. Significant discrepancies were observed for some nuclides. For accurate long-lived radioactive nuclide generation in reactor shielding, material-specific cross-section libraries should be generated and verified by measurement.
